Jeffrey Eugenides

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides—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.
"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

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Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. Leonard Bankhead -- charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy -- suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell...

For many years, the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charlie Citrine, a young man inflamed with a love for literature, were the best of friends. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and Charlie's life has reached a low point: his career is at a standstill, and he's enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the...

Presents a selection of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.