Pulitzer Prize-winning Greek-American novelist Jeffrey Eugenides will speak at the National Hellenic Museum (NHM) in Chicago’s Greektown neighborhood on Thursday, Dec. 5, at 7-8:30 p.m. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Chicago Tribune features writer Christopher Borrelli will have a conversation with Eugenides.
Eugenides has written works such as The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex and The Marriage Plot. According to Amazon’s website, Middlesex—a 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that has been an Oprah’s Book Club selection—is the “story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
“To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction.”
According to The Guardian, Middlesex is based on elements of Eugenides’s own biography as well as that of Herculine Barbin, a 19th-century intersex convent girl who died by suicide at age 30.
A limited amount of free tickets is available on a first-come, first-served basis at this link. The Consulate General of Greece in Chicago and the National Hellenic Museum are hosting the event.