Jeffrey Eugenides

While perhaps not as virtuosic as his peers—David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, and Jonathan Franzen to name a few—and definitely the least prolific among them, with nine years between each of his novels, Michigan native Jeffrey Eugenides nevertheless has established himself as a major figure on the literary landscape. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, written in a curious but cool first-person-plural voice, tells of the lives and deaths of the Lisbon sisters and their power to captivate the imaginations of the boys in their Grosse Point neighborhood. Upon publication, Suicides signaled the emergence of a mature, sophisticated voice, and when Sofia Coppola adapted it to film, Eugenides got his first taste of fame. While Middlesex, Eugenides' second novel, is a fictional memoir, it's also written from an unusual perspective in that the narrator, Cal/Calliope Stephanides, is a hermaphrodite. With Middlesex, Eugenides widened his scope, digging into his Greek roots while examining some of the racial tensions at work in the Detroit of his childhood. Between an Oprah endorsement and a Pulitzer Prize, the book became a hugely popular success and cult favorite. The Marriage Plot signals a new direction for his talents, taking a more conventional approach that looks at the lives of three college graduates on the brink of adulthood who are painfully linked in unresolved relationships with one another. Eugenides is sensitively attuned to the permeable state of being young and unformed by the world. And though he chronicles the loss of that state in his work, he never sentimentalizes it, mining it instead for all of its drama, humor, and unexpected insight in uniquely compelling ways.