Jeffrey Eugenides
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
Rooney, who has a masters degree in English literature, told The New Yorker in 2018 that her books are “basically 19th-century novels dressed up in contemporary clothing” – books that Connell spends much of his time reading as an English student at Trinity College, Dublin. (The eagle-eyed will notice Rooney uses a quote from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda as an epigraph.) The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex) also took inspiration from the English literary canon in his third book, a campus novel set Brown University in Rhode Island, in which the English major Madeleine Hanna havers between two suitors, while writing her thesis on Victorian romances. There’s more to it than that – Madeleine takes a detour into Derrida and Barthes; her hapless admirer Mitchell wrestles with theology; her mercurial boyfriend Leonard is diagnosed with bipolar disorder – but, in essence, this metafictional love triangle is a book about books that has much that will appeal those who like Normal People.
From our article Books like Normal People
“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
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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.
