“Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.”

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.