Publication Date:April 27, 2009 Availability:Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Features:
•
ISBN13: 9780312428815
•
Condition: New
•
Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
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.
Jefferey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford universities. The Virgin Suicides was published in 1993 and was adapted into a motion picture in 1999 by Sophia Coppola. His second novel, Middlesex, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. He joined the faculty of Princeton University in the fall of 2007.
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. The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.
"Arresting . . . uncannily evokes the wry voice of adolescence and a mixture of curiosity, lust, tenderness, morbidity, cynicism, and the naïveté surrounding these bizarre events."—The Wall Street Journal
"A piercing first novel . . . Incantatory prose . . . The narrator's hypnotic voice succeeds in transporting us to that mythic realm where fate, not common sense or psychology, holds sway. By turns lyrical and portentous, ferocious and elegiac, The Virgin Suicides insinuates itself into our minds as a small but powerful opera in the unexpected form of a novel."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Mr. Eugenides is blessed with the storyteller's most magical gift, the ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary."—Suzanne Berne, The New York Times Book Review
"Arresting . . . uncannily evokes the wry voice of adolescence and a mixture of curiosity, lust, tenderness, morbidity, cynicism, and the naïveté surrounding these bizarre events."—The Wall Street Journal
"[A] comic and elegiac first novel . . . Eugenides is one of those rare writers who can manage sympathy and detachment simultaneously—and work small wonders with words while he's at it. As The Virgin Suicides puts its heroines through hell, its readers, weirdly enough, will be delighted."—David Gates, Newsweek
"The Virgin Suicides takes the dark stuff of Greek tragedy and reworks it into an eccentric, mesmerizing, frequently hilarious American fantasy about the tyranny of unrequited love, and the unknowable heart of every family on earth—but especially the family next door . . . There's much here that's marvelously original, and like Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus or Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, this is one of those debuts that tell you you are present at the beginning of a major career and make you glad you own a first edition."—Tom De Haven, Entertainment Weekly
"Rhapsodic . . . With a deft, often comedic touch, Eugenides examines the concept of mass suicide in a way that might, in less assured hands, strain a reader's credulity. By skillfully displaying the parents' inability to succor the grief of their surviving daughters and by showing a father 'with the lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be all the life he ever had,' the author makes the reader understand the lemminglike conduct of a group of adolescent siblings. By turns hypnotic and elegiac, the novel manages to sustain a high level of suspense in what is clearly an impressive debut."—People
"Eugenides's remarkable first novel opens on a startling note: 'On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide . . . the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.' What follows is not, however, a horror novel, but a finely crafted work of literary if slightly macabre imagination. In an unnamed town in the slightly distant past, detailed in such precise and limpid prose that readers will surely feel that they grew up there, Cecilia—the youngest and most obviously wacky of the luscious Lisbon girls—finally succeeds in taking her own life. As the confused neighbors watch rather helplessly, the remaining sisters become isolated and unhinged, ending it all in a spectacular multiple suicide anticipated from the first page. Eugenides's engrossing writing style keeps one reading despite a creepy feeling that one shouldn't be enjoying it so much. A black, glittering novel."—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
"Eugenides's tantalizing, macabre first novel begins with a suicide, the first of the five bizarre deaths of the teenage daughters in the Lisbon family; the rest of the work, set in the author's native Michigan in the early 1970s, is a backward-looking quest as the male narrator and his nosy, horny pals describe how they strove to understand the odd clan of this first chapter, which appeared in the Paris Review, where it won the 1991 Aga Khan Prize for fiction . . .Eugenides's voice is so fresh and compelling, his powers of observation so startling and acute, that most will be mesmerized. The title derives from a song by the fictional rock band Cruel Crux, a favorite of the Lisbon daughter Lux—who, unlike her sisters Therese, Mary, Bonnie and Cecilia, is anything but a virgin by the tale's end. Her mother forces Lux to burn the album along with others she considers dangerously provocative. Mr. Lisbon, a mild-mannered high school math teacher, is driven to resign by parents who believe his control of their children may be as deficient as his control of his own brood . . . Under the narrator's goofy, posturing banter are some hard truths: mortality is a fact of life; teenage girls are more attracted to brawn than to brains (contrary to the testimony of the narrator's male relatives). This is an auspicious debut from an imaginative and talented writer."—Publishers Weekly
interesting but simple at timesAugust 24, 2010 psychmaster this book was alright. The premise was a bit simple but Eugenide's ability to describe people emotions and settings are apparent through this novel. The Narration in this book at times was a bit hard to follow and i found that I really enjoyed his book Middlesex so much better. There was much more of a story in that book. As a masters student of psychology and employed in the psych field i thought his insight into suicide and mental illness was lacking but did show how people form their own opinions and form such interest in things unknown. a great sociological teaching tool for reactions to deviant behaviors.
the virgin suicidesAugust 4, 2010 BeckieB Egenides out does himself. This novel is supurb, and I recomend it to anyone who LOVES a great piece of writting.
memorableJune 17, 2010 Jillian R For days, this book stuck with me.
About the Lisbon girls; sisters... who all, evidently, commit suicide at different times and in different ways. Different, like they are from each other. Why they did it, the readers wouldnt know until quite in the end. The story is narrated by one of the boys who grew up with the Lisbon girls, who adored them and have been captured by them. Obviously, or else they wouldn't be watching them and talking about them long after their lives ended.
This book stuck with me long after I finished reading it that I went out of my way to actually rent the movie version of this on dvd. Yup, I wanted to see how it would compare to the original novel. I have to say, I liked the movie and thought the actors played the characters very well. But there was just something about this book....
It was a combination of both dark and light (as in weight, not brightness), appealing yet appalling all at the same time. Maybe it's the author's writing. Easy to understand, easy to get, easy to grasp, easy to relate to.
I have to admit in some few pages I was a little bored with it, but somehow by the end of every chapter, there's always something new that brings me back to reading. So I keep reading.. and when I finished, I'll say, it was something else.
Readdd it. Wattcch it. Whatever you want to do. Just know the story and know the Lisbon girls and know the boys that were obsessed with them, and hopefully you'll see what I mean.
Haunts like a Dream.April 30, 2010 C. Park 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
i consider this one of the best american novels written in the last half of the twentieth century. lofty, i know, but there is something about its weather that calls me back, over and over again. the author is the rare writer who can make a girl blowdrying her hair by a window sound like something out of a dream. whole lines of this novel constantly assail me. such as- "audrey hepburn- whom women were obsessed with and men never think about". the strange, midafternoon sleepiness is like waking up in gentle nightmare and its 1975 and peter frampton is on the radio, but everyone is dead. you can never hear gilbert o. sullivan the same again. i mean, i always thought bread (the band) was creepy, and its inclusion as almost a plot device is like the author has a hardwire into my brain. if you were a child in any part of the seventies, this is going to strike an unusual, creepy chord with you. the movie i didn't care for all that much, but kirsten dunst as lux, well, nobody else could have done it. at the same time, its a sweet creepiness, and its the kind that is the hardest to find. no other book takes me to the place this one does. if you don't read it, you should eat it.
poetic but falls short as a novelApril 25, 2010 Boston Reader(Boston, MA USA) Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex" is one of my favorite novels, and so my expectations were high for The Virgin Suicides. I wonder if that's why I was so disappointed in this tale of the suicides of a whole family of adolescent girls. I listened to the audio-book, and the reader was quite good, but I never was engaged by the story or characters. The writing was beautiful. It really was mysterious and poetic, but that was not enough to sustain me for a whole novel. While I enjoyed bits and pieces very much, this story just never grabbed a hold of me. About a third of the way through, I decided that I didn't care enough to continue. Maybe it picked up later, but I'll never know.
CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME.
