Fresh Complaint

by Jeffrey Eugenides

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780594891277
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/03/2017
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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. His collection of short stories, Fresh Complaint, is from FSG (2017). Eugenides is a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton.

Hometown:

Princeton, NJ

Date of Birth:

March 8, 1960

Place of Birth:

Detroit, Michigan

Education:

B.A. in English, Brown University, 1983; M.A. in creative writing/English, Stanford University, 1986

Editorial Reviews

The good news is how solid these stories…Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, Eugenides writes like a man who is enjoying himself. The feeling is contagious. He's a consistently perceptive writer, so much so that when you put this book down it's like leaving one of those movies that Windex-freshens the panes of your mind…He writes with elegiac wit about middle-class, mostly educated men and women whose lives have begun to grind them down…Eugenides pushes these scenarios to extremes that are comic and devastating…[Fresh Complaint] delivers many small corkscrews of feeling. For all of its interest in failure and misbehavior, it is threaded with a strong moral sensibility…its charm and insight are real, and formidable.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

Editor's Pick - AudioFile

"It’s not a surprise that actress Cynthia Nixon would be a good audiobook reader. It’s surprising that she isn’t hired to read every audiobook. She completely owns the 2 stories she reads...[Ari] Fliakos is endlessly entertaining while never letting theatrics outshine the characters on the page." -Booklist

"The theme of complaint extends beyond the title story, but for listeners the key takeaway is the word "fresh." Jeffrey Eugenides's fresh writing merges the mundane with the meaningful. "Airmail," with a plot that fuses amoebic dysentery with spiritual enlightenment, showcases his originality and—since he also narrates it—his ability to navigate multiple accents and personalities. ...Cynthia Nixon..performances of ["The Baster"] and her other story, "Complainers," are stellar" - AudioFile

"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

From the Publisher

The theme of complaint extends beyond the title story, but for listeners the key takeaway is the word “fresh.” Jeffrey Eugenides’s fresh writing merges the mundane with the meaningful. “Airmail,” with a plot that fuses amoebic dysentery with spiritual enlightenment, showcases his originality and—since he also narrates it—his ability to navigate multiple accents and personalities. The audio production does have flaws, though. Cynthia Nixon appears miscast in “The Baster,” a story with a male first-person narrator. Still, her performances of it and her other story, “Complainers,” are stellar. Ari Fliakos narrates the remaining stories with good instincts and character interplay, but a wavering Irish accent injures his efforts. These complaints should not deter listeners from hearing the more profound stories in this collection. K.W. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2017 - AudioFile

★ 2017-06-20
Well-off, well-intentioned people find their just-so lives upended, often in curious ways, in this first collection of short stories by Eugenides (The Marriage Plot, 2011, etc.).Two of the stories here are close cousins to Eugenides' novels: "Air Mail" features Mitchell, the lovelorn spiritual seeker in The Marriage Plot, battling a case of dysentery in Thailand, while "The Oracular Vulva" concerns a researcher studying the same intersexual characteristics that stoked the plot of Middlesex (2002). But neither of those stories reads like a lesser dry run for a more serious work, and the collection throughout is marked by a rich wit, an eye for detail, and a sense of the absurd. The plots often involve relationships hitting the skids, as in "Early Music," in which a couple watches their artistic ambitions crash into the brick wall of fiscal responsibility, or "Find the Bad Guy," about a green-card marriage gone awry. (The contents of the narrator's pockets tell a pathetic tale in itself: "loose change, 5-Hour Energy bottle, and an Ashley Madison ad torn from some magazine.") Eugenides enjoys putting his characters into odd predicaments: "Baster" centers on a woman pursuing a pregnancy via the title's kitchen gadget, while the writer who narrates "Great Experiment" contemplates defrauding his wealthy but stingy employer, using de Tocqueville's writings as a rationalization. But Eugenides never holds up his characters for outright mockery, and the two fine new stories that bookend the collection gracefully navigate darker territory: "Complainers" is narrated by a woman confronting her longtime friend's dementia, and "Fresh Complaint" turns on a young Indian-American woman's provocative scheme to escape an arranged marriage. We humans are well-meaning folk, Eugenides means to say, but life tends to force us into bad behavior. Sprightly or serious, Eugenides consistently writes about complex lives with depth and compassion.

Kirkus Reviews