MiddlesexMiddlesex
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Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparents' desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s.
<p><b><i>Middlesex </i>is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. <br></b><br><b>A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of <i>The Virgin Suicides</i>--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.</b> <br><br><i>"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license...records my first name simply as Cal."</i><br><br>So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Jeffrey Eugenides's <i>Middlesex </i>is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.</p>
<p><b><i>Middlesex </i>is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. <br></b><br><b>A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of <i>The Virgin Suicides</i>--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.</b> <br><br><i>"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license...records my first name simply as Cal."</i><br><br>So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Jeffrey Eugenides's <i>Middlesex </i>is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.</p>
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- New York : Picador, c2002.
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