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I'd rate this 3.5 stars.Ever since Jeffrey Eugenides burst on to the literary scene in the early 1990s with The Virgin Suicides , he's proven himself to be an expert commentator on the foibles of the human condition, sex, adolescence, relationships, family dynamics, and, at times, the often-mundane challenges of everyday life. He further cemented that reputation with Middlesex and The Marriage Plot , so when I heard that he'd finally be coming out with a short story collection, I was e...
“Baster” is disturbingly good, as is the titled story, “Fresh Complaints”. Eugenides is a competent and intelligent writer.
Complainers 5/5Air Mail 3/5Baster 5/5Early music 5/5Timeshare 3/5Find the Bad Guy 5/5The Oracular Vulva 5/5 Capricious gardens 5/5Great experiment 4/5Fresh Complaint 5/5 * * *
Audiobook....I like Jeffrey Eugenides. I enjoy his writing - I loved “MiddleSex”.....and I like “The Marriage Plot” much more than most in my local book club. But - I’m so-so about these 10 short stories. I was taken in right away with the first story: “Complainers” — Della and Cathy are friends. Della is much older and married. Della’s husband runs into financial problems after making some risky investments which failed after he insisted that moving to Florida was the right move. Cathy was angr...
I was in Austin this past weekend doing a panel for Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America, but I had the first day of the festival all to myself. One of the big events I’d been dying to attend was the panel with Jeffrey Eugenides and Claire Messud. It’s a six hour drive from South Texas up to Austin, and I used the opportunity to finish listening to Fresh Complaint, a collection of stories written between 1988 to 2017. With the exception of the title story, most of...
“No one knew what the original music sounded like. You had to make an educated guess and do the best you could. (…) Sometimes you thought you heard the music, especially when you were young, and then you spent the rest of your life trying to reproduce the sound. Everybody’s life was early music.” This collection of ten short stories covers almost three decades of Eugenides’ writing career, from 1988 to the present, and it is interesting to see how certain topics remain at the center of the autho...
This collection of stories was very hit or miss, but mostly miss. The misogynistic overtones were disappointing from an author whose work I’ve really enjoyed in the past.
It's rare that I read a collection of short stories and give it 5 stars. There's nearly always a dud story or two (or more) which bring the rating down. But Fresh Complaint is that rare exception: I loved every story. Okay there were some I loved more than others, but all of them created a unique world, with characters that were quirky and real, with wonderful writing, and nearly always with an ending that satisfied. Characters are transformed, regretful, and sneaky. My favourite is probably Fre...
These were undeniably well-written, but had an undercurrent of misogyny that I didn't like--it's the same feeling I get when reading Updike (see especially: Early Music, Baster, and Fresh Complaint). I also would have preferred if the stories were in date order.
My review for the Chicago Tribune: http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifesty...Jeffrey Eugenides' new collection may be called "Fresh Complaint," but the stories themselves are less fresh and more retrospective. The book consists of an array of material ranging from 1988 to 2017, including "Air Mail," which was selected by Annie Proulx for the 1997 edition of "The Best American Short Stories" and "Capricious Gardens," which began as part of his master's thesis.Better known for his long-form fiction,...
Wow. Jeffrey Eugenides deserves all the accolades typically heaped on Pulitzer Prize winners. In my reading journeys, I've often disagreed with these book jacket platitudes. In fact, I've found candidates for the prize usually better and more skilled writers than the winners, but in "Fresh Complaint," we find a scribe truly worth all the hype. This is a compendium of Eugenides's work spanning three decades, and it shows his growth as a writer; each story is a fresh world to step into, with chara...