A Signed First Edition Club Recommendation
"These stories, which take place all over the world from the 80s to today, showcase Jeffrey Eugenides's talent for developing compelling, complex characters whose weirdness and crises we can't get enough of. Reading it is a bit like running into old friends, as Eugenides revisits characters from Middlesex and The Marriage Plot, and it's a testament to his writing skill that this collection manages to be both bleak and fun."
Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date 2017-10-03
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Meghan B.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780374203061
The first collection of short fiction from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides Jeffrey Eugenides’s bestselling novels have shown him to be an astute observer of the crises of adolescence, self-discovery, family love, and what it means to be American in our times. The stories in “Fresh Complaint” explore equally rich––and intriguing––territory. Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of “Baster” to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail” (selected by Annie Proulx for Best American Short Stories), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people’s wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art founder under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in “Fresh Complaint,” a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her immigrant family lead her to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged British physicist. Narratively compelling, beautifully written, and packed with a density of ideas despite their fluid grace, these stories chart the development and maturation of a major American writer.