The Marriage Plot (Signed and Dated First Edition and First Printing)

Eugenides, Jeffery

ISBN 10: 0374203059 / ISBN 13: 9780374203054

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY, 2011

About this Item

A NEW copy of the FIRST EDITION; FIRST PRINTING. This copy has only been opened for signing. In flawless condition. Signed "Eugenides" on the title page and also dated beside his signature "10-24-11" (two weeks after the publication date). A very fine collectible copy.

Seller Inventory # 000159

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Marriage Plot (Signed and Dated First Edition and First Printing)
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374203059
• ISBN 13: 9780374203054
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book of 2011
A Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Book of 2011
A Kirkus Reviews Top 25 Best Fiction of 2011 Title
One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2011
A Salon Best Fiction of 2011 title
One of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books of the Year 2011

It's the early 1980s―the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.

As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France," real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead―charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy―suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell Grammaticus―who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange―resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

About the Author

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published by FSG to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex (FSG, 2002), which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France’s Prix Médicis. The Marriage Plot (FSG, 2011) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won both the Prix Fitzgerald and the Madame Figaro Literary Prize. His collection of short stories, Fresh Complaint, is from FSG (2017). Eugenides is a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton.