Jeffrey Eugenides - The Virgin Suicides

Deftly written and intricately imaginedsizzling.

Newsweek

Mr. Eugenides is blessed with the storytellers most magical gift, the ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary.

The New York Times Book Review

Arrestinguncannily evokes the wry voice of adolescence and a mixture of curiosity, lust, tenderness, morbidity, cynicism, and the naivet surrounding these bizarre events.

The Wall Street Journal

Displays a certain brillianceEugenides has a voice dreamy with mythology and a point of view carved from the poignancy of adolescence. The resulting sensibility is both elegant and quirky, and it infuses his first novel with a graceful, reasoned confidence. Wistful, gloomy, and chillingly funny at onceA fiercely antipastoral novelone with a shocking, elegiac sadness in the eaves.

The Boston Globe

Rhapsodicwith a deft, often comedic touchBy turns hypnotic and elegiac, the novel manages to sustain a high level of suspense in what is clearly an impressive debut.

People

A rare first novel that ends wondrously, on a note of profoundest, most elegant grief.

John Hawkes

Remarkablea black, glittering novelEugenidess engrossing writing style keeps one reading despite a creepy feeling that one shouldnt be enjoying it so much.

Library Journal

CompellingThe book is a balance of sweet awkwardness and contemporary horror, with enough classical, mythic, and religious references to give English lit doctoral candidates a contact high.[ The Virgin Suicides ] is funny, poignant, full of the conflicts of growing up at a disordered time and place.

The Miami Herald

A lyrical and, at times, darkly humorous tale.

Newsday

A hypnotic storytellerA beautiful, funny, and touching novelJeffrey Eugenides has created a mythology out of the ostensibly common materials of middle-class, middle-American lifepurveying a kind of domestic magic realism which is all his own.

Jay McInerney

PiercingWith its incantatory prose, its fascination with teenage tragedy, and its preoccupation with memory and desire and loss The Virgin Suicides insinuates itself into our minds as a small but powerful opera in the unexpected form of a novel.

The New York Times

Extraordinary.

Mademoiselle

TantalizingEugenidess voice is so fresh and compelling, his powers of observation so startling and acute, that most will be mesmerized. An auspicious debut from an imaginative and talented writer.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Brassy and laden with ironyyet it achieves its own odd level of tragedy as well, elaborating the scrollwork of teen fantasy in its funniest and most nightmarish possibilities.

Mirabella

A remarkable and beautiful book.

Gilbert Sorrentino

The beginning of a major careerLike Philip Roths Goodbye, Columbus or Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club , this is one of those debuts that make you glad to own your own first edition.

Entertainment Weekly

Not to be missedDebut novelist Eugenides is a heavyweight: Proof of it is in nearly every pitch-perfect sentence of this startling and very good book.[He] writes just about as well as anyone in recent memory has about male teenage desire, mythologizing, and half-rational thought. Maybe the most eccentrically successful, genuinely lyrical first novel since William Whartons Birdy.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

ExtraordinaryremarkableEugenides celebrates, grieves, and honors the mystery of the most commonplace lives.

The Times (London)

Eugenides weaves a sinuous spell. In most coming-of-age novels, a thin black line separates intensity from banality, but the peculiar hormonal lyricism of The Virgin Suicides is shot through with sneaky black humor that banishes sentimentality and sociologyall the funny-sad effluvia of growing up concentrated and purified into a slender, intoxicating book.

Esquire

An impressive first novelone of the most macabre denouements in recent fiction.

Glamour

Picador
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York

For Gus and Wanda