Fresh Complaint
AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR
AN EVENING STANDARD BOOK OF THE YEAR
The first-ever collection of short stories from Jeffrey Eugenides, the bestselling author of Middlesex, The Virgin Suicides and The Marriage Plot, explores characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies.
Kendall has failed as a poet, and now embezzlement seems like his next-best career option. Rebecca has failed to find customers for her mouse figurines, now the bailiffs are coming for her husband. Diane has failed to meet ‘the one’, but is thrilled to have found her path to motherhood through a turkey baster.
With his trademark humour, compassion and complex understanding of what it is to be human, Jeffrey Eugenides’ stories elevate muddling through into something triumphant.
Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published by FSG to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex (FSG, 2002), which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France’s Prix Médicis. The Marriage Plot (FSG, 2011) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won both the Prix Fitzgerald and the Madame Figaro Literary Prize. Eugenides is a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton.