Virgins and Hermaphrodites

Got your attention, didn’t that? Nearly a decade ago Jeffrey Eugenides wrote The Virgin Suicides, a strangely warm novel about five teenage sisters who kill themselves, and the neighborhood boys who try to understand them. Sophia Coppola (yes, daughter of) turned it into a surprisingly good movie. This week’s New Yorker has an excerpt from an upcoming book by Eugenides, Middlesex, which is just as unusual as its predecessor and, if the excerpt is an indication, just as brilliant. It’s the story of a hermaphrodite. The excerpt is delicate, sensual, funny, evocative.

Author: Peter Maass

I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.