Most Popular Books by Jeffrey Eugenides

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girl''s school in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them, as well as Callie''s failure to develop, leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not a girl at all; due to a rare genetic mutation Callie is part girl, part boy.

The first collection of short fiction from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides

A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 A Publisher''s Weekly Top 10 Book of 2011 A Kirkus Reviews Top 25 Best Fiction of 2011 Title One of Library Journal''s Best Books of 2011 A Salon Best Fiction of 2011 title One of The Telegraph''s Best Fiction Books of the Year 2011 It''s the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But 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. As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France," real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. 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 Grammaticus—who''s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange—resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can''t escape the secret responsible for Leonard''s seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love. Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

Oscar Wilde’s only novel, first published in 1890, is a brilliant puzzle, intended to tease convention minds with its exploration of the myriad interrelationships between art, life, and consequence. From its provocative preface, challenging the reader to believe in “art for art’s sake”, to its sensational conclusion, the book explores the nature of sin through the tale of a young man who sells his soul for a lifetime of beauty.

Dopo dieci anni di silenzio torna l''autore de Le vergini suicide . Una ben strana vicenda viene raccontata da Calliope Stephanides, una rara specie di ermafrodito che ha vissuto i primi anni della sua vita come bambina, prima di scoprire la sua doppia natura...