“He felt as if he were being violently emptied out, as if a big magnet were pulling his blood and fluids down into the earth. He was weeping again, unstoppably, his head like the chandelier in his grandparents’ house in Buffalo, the one that was too high for them to reach and that every time he visited had one fewer bulb alight. His head was an old chandelier, going dark.”

American author

Jeffrey Eugenides is an American author. He is known for fiction that has reached a wide audience, especially his novels The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot. Born in 1960, he has also written short stories and essays. His best-known novel, The Virgin Suicides, was adapted into a film in 1999. Middlesex brought him the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France’s Prix Médicis. His work is often read for its close attention to identity, family, and the pressures of modern life.