“The theme of complaint extends beyond the title story, but for listeners the key takeaway is the word ‘fresh.’ Jeffrey Eugenides’s fresh writing…showcases his originality and — since he also narrates it — his ability to navigate multiple accents and personalities.” — AudioFile Magazine

The first collection of short fiction from Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot.

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 worded, and packed with a density of ideas despite their fluid grace, these stories chart the development and maturation of a major American author.

More praise for Fresh Complaint:

“It’s not a surprise that Cynthia Nixon would be a good audiobook reader. It’s surprising that she isn’t hired to read every audiobook…Fliakos is endlessly entertaining while never letting theatrics outshine the characters on the page. This collection, Eugenides’ first, includes 10 stories spanning three decades of the author’s work. Hearing them read in a variety of voices emphasizes the changes in style and point of view that Eugenides has played with throughout his career.” — Booklist

“Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, Eugenides writes like a man who is enjoying himself. The feeling is contagious.” — Dwight Garner for The New York Times

“As I’ve noted before, I’d listen to Fliakos read the phone book. You don’t get him or Nixon to sign on for short stories unless you have something choice in the way of material. And Eugenides certainly delivers that.” — NJ.com

Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Audie Award for best unabridged fiction, Middlesex marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America’s best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls’ school, Grosse Pointe, MI, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them – along with Callie’s failure to develop – leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia – back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie’s grandparents fled for their lives, back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.

Sprawling across eight decades – and one unusually awkward adolescence – Jeffrey Eugenide’s long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.

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 cafes 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.

First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters–beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys–commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.