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Middlesex: A Novel Audiobook, by Jeffrey Eugenides Play Audiobook Sample

Middlesex: A Novel Audiobook

Middlesex: A Novel Audiobook, by Jeffrey Eugenides Play Audiobook Sample
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Read By: Kristoffer Tabori Publisher: Macmillan Audio Listen Time: at 1.0x Speed 14.17 hours at 1.5x Speed 10.63 hours at 2.0x Speed Release Date: March 2003 Format: Unabridged Audiobook ISBN: 9781593971045

Other Audiobooks Written by Jeffrey Eugenides: > View All...

Publisher Description

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school, Grosse Pointe, MI, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia - back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives, back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite. Sprawling across eight decades - and one unusually awkward adolescence - Jeffrey Eugenide's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Audie Award for best unabridged fiction, Middlesex marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.

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“Tenderly rendered…Italso is a story of assimilation on a much more embracing, even epic, scale, astory viewed through the scrims of psychology, the language of Middlesex pops, screeches, clatters withnoise and life, with the muffled moans of passion in an upstairs bedroom, thesiren whine and pounding thunder of Henry Ford’s assembly line, the sharp crackof ice under the wheels of a rumrunner’s Packard, the trill of a clarinet solo piercinga muggy summer night, the whole raucous booming-thudding-wailing soundtrack ofthe century.”

— Miami Herald

Quotes

  • “Part Tristram Shandy, part Ishmael, part Holden Caulfield, Cal is a wonderfully engaging narrator…A deeply affecting portrait of one family’s tumultuous engagement with the American twentieth century.”

    — New York Times
  • “Jeffrey Eugenides is a big and big-hearted talent, and Middlesex is a weird, wonderful novel that will sweep you off your feet.

    — Jonathan Franzen
  • The author is a gifted storyteller who relates 10 decades of one Greek family's life with evocative words and poignant images, which please the ear and mind. Kristoffer Tabori's dramatization gives a strong sense that he's savoring the telling.

    — Audio File
  • Without a doubt, this audio edition of Eugenide's long-awaited second novel represents an acme of the audiobook genre: the whole equals more than the sum of its parts…Tabori's performance of the text is phenomenal…Not only are his interpretations of the characters astonishingly credible, but his internalization of the narrative is nothing short of amazing.

    — Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review
  • What made me fall in love with audiobooks was not so much the story (which is amazing), but rather the narration of the book done by Kristoffer Tabori. This performance, for me, elevated audiobooks from a convenient way to get more books ‘read' to an actual performance art.

    — Brain Candy Book Reviews
  • “[Eugenides] is well on his way to becoming a spectacular mythologist, attacking some of our most enduring riddles with heroic energy, keen wit, and genuine compassion…Everyone we meet in Middlesex is vibrantly alive…Eugenides has taken the greatest mystery of all—What are we, exactly, and where do we come from?—and crafted a story that manages to be both illuminating and transcendent.”

    — Los Angeles Times Book Review
  • “Rollicking, gleefully inventive…Middlesex serves as a tribute to Nabokovian themes…Eugenides recounts the revelation of Callie’s genetic abnormality through a series of near-discoveries that are amazingly comically missed.”

    — Washington Post
  • “[Middlesex is] one of the most impressive American novels…Eugenides has created a spirited, high-energy comic epic.”

    — Newsday
  • “A big, cheeky, splendid novel…It goes places few narrators would dare to tread…Lyrical and fine.”

    — Boston Globe
  • “Unprecedented, astounding…The most reliably American story there is: A son of immigrants finally finds love after growing up feeling like a freak.”

    — San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
  • “Middlesex is about a hermaphrodite in the way that Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel is about a teenage boy…A novel of chance, family, sex, surgery, and America, it contains multitudes.”

    — Men’s Journal
  • “An epic…This feast of a novel is thrilling in the scope of its imagination and surprising in its tenderness.”

    — People
  • “Vibrantly strange and heroic…Nothing is simple in this bighearted, restless story, not even choosing the right pronoun to describe the protean hero.”

    — Entertainment Weekly
  • “Eugenides invites one and all to populate the great Greek-American novel…Boisterous…With Middlesex, a mirror house love poem to his Greek ‘family,’ Jeffrey Eugenides proves he has literary muscle second to none.”

    — Philadelphia Inquirer
  • “Poetic verve…He evokes an entirely fresh shade of tough, enduring love…A revelation of originality and vast invention.”

    — St. Louis Post-Dispatch
  • “At last Detroit has its great novel. What Dublin got from James Joyce—a sprawling, ambitious, loving, exasperated, and playful chronicle of all its good and bad parts—Detroit has from native son Eugenides.”

    — Detroit Free Press
  • “Epic and wondrous…Middlesex begins as a generous, tragicomic family chronicle of immigration and assimilation, becomes along the way a social novel about Detroit, perhaps the most symbolic of American cities, and incorporates a heartbreaking tale of growing up awkward and lonely in 70s suburbia. It’s a big, affectionate, and often hilarious book.”

    — Salon.com
  • “Amazing…A modern classic.”

    — Oregonian
  • “Big, funny, flamboyantly imaginative…As warmhearted as it is unpredictable.”

    — Arizona Republic
  • “Middlesex is so fully imagined, so vivid, funny, touching, and original, that it often left me grinning with delight.”

    — San Jose Mercury News
  • “Middlesex is also a pleasing mix of discussions of scientifically exact genetics and Greek-American yarns. It is genetics as storytelling.”

    — Vogue
  • “An often affecting, funny, and deeply human book…A charming ingenuous writer…Middlesex is an enormously ambitious book, whose many stories do indeed gather to present a broad swath of Greek-American life.”

    — New Republic
  • “Eugenides does such a superb job of capturing the ironies of trade-offs of assimilation that Calliope’s evolution into Cal doesn’t feel sudden at all, but more like a transformation we’ve been through ourselves.”

    — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
  • “[An] exercise in narratological brio…Genuinely moving.”

    — Times Literary Supplement (London)
  • “Middlesex contains scenes that are as wonderful as written prose can get…As it is, Eugenides has written a novel that you could give to your own teenage sons and daughters so that they might better understand their passage through the universal confusion of puberty.”

    — Bookforum

Awards

  • Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
  • A New York Times Bestseller
  • A USA Today Bestseller
  • An Oprah’s Book Club Selection
  • Winner of the 2003 Audie Award
  • Winner of the 2003 Ambassador Book Award for Fiction
  • A 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Finalist
  • Winner of the 2003 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction
  • A 2002 New York Times Editor’s Choice
  • A 2002 Los Angeles Times Best Book for Fiction
  • A 2002 Chicago Tribune Book of the Year for Fiction
  • A 2002 San Francisco Chronicle Best Book for Fiction
  • A 2002 Entertainment Weekly Best Book for Fiction
  • A 2002 Barnes & Noble Best Book for Fiction
  • A 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award
  • ALA Stonewall Book Award - Honor Book, 2005
  • Nominated for International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award - Nominee, 2004
  • Among longlisted titles for Audible.com 100 Audible Essentials, 2007
  • ALA Stonewall Book Award - Honor Book, 2003
  • Nominated for Lambda Literary Award - Nominee, 2002
  • Winner of Pulitzer Prize - Winner, 2003
  • Nominated for National Book Critics Circle Awards - Nominee, 2002
  • Winner of Great Lakes Book Award - Winner, 2003
  • Winner of Ambassador Book Award - Winner, 2003
  • Winner of Audie Award Winner, 2003

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About Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for his novel Middlesex, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France’s Prix Médicis was also selected for Oprah’s Book Club. The Marriage Plot was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won both the Prix Fitzgerald and the Madame Figaro Literary Prize. The Virgin Suicides was adapted into a critically-acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola. He is a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton.