Books by Jeffrey Eugenides
This intoxicating book – like Little Fires Everywhere – is set in an all-American suburb, and tells the story of the Lisbon sisters: four beautiful schoolgirls whose lives become increasingly controlled and confined by their parents after the suicide of their youngest sister. Suffused with sexual longing, the book is famously narrated by the unnamed boys of the local community in the first person plural. Eugenides’s text was sympathetically adapted by Sofia Coppola in 1999; both the book and the film are works of art in their own right.
From our article Books like Little Fires Everywhere
The Marriage Plot
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Eugenide's eagerly awaited follow-up to The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex offers a love triangle among a group of Brown University students, and is itself a kind of pastiche of the 19th-century novels the English undergraduates have been analysing in class. Eugenides has said that the book is, very loosely, based upon his own collegiate experiences.
Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
🏆 Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Eugenides' million-copy-selling novel Middlesex, in which schoolgirl Calliope Stephanides is discovered at puberty to be intersex, turns into a sprawling family saga, as it slips back in time to follow the transmission of the responsible gene through several generations of a family of Greek immigrants to the United States. Of its writing, Eugenides once recalled: "The entire structure for the novel appeared in my head, fully formed, as ravishing as a crystal palace on a distant hill."
“Eugenides does a really nice job of illustrating the complexity of emotional life, the emotional life that doesn’t necessarily fall into neat categories.” Read more...
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Psychologist
Interviews where books by Jeffrey Eugenides were recommended
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels
Every year, the Pulitzer Prize jury awards $15,000 to a work of “distinguished fiction published during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” We’ve compiled a guide to the books that have won this prize since the turn of the millennium.
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1
The Book of Human Emotions: An Encyclopedia of Feeling from Anger to Wanderlust
by Tiffany Watt Smith -
2
Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides -
3
Principles of Psychology
by William James -
4
Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion and Pride
by David DeSteno -
5
Stumbling on Happiness
by Daniel Gilbert
The Best Books on Emotions, recommended by Lisa Feldman Barrett
The Best Books on Emotions, recommended by Lisa Feldman Barrett
Not every culture has a word for ‘fear.’ Smiling was an invention of the Middle Ages. There’s a lot that will surprise you about the way we process emotions, says the neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett. Here she picks five books that illustrate our understanding of how emotions work.
The Best Campus Novels
Life in an academic institution can be a curiously intense experience. As a result, the hot-house atmosphere of a university campus or boarding school presents a fitting backdrop for novels exploring ambition, power dynamics, crushes, and sexual crises. Here, we’ve pulled together a list of campus novels that have been recommended on Five Books over the years, via our interviews with literary scholars, bestselling authors and book prize judges.
