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Oprah has named her latest selection to her book club, choosing Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. With that announcement the book has shot up the bestseller lists.

Publisher’s Weekly describes the novel’s storyline: “As the Age of the Genome begins to dawn, we will, perhaps, expect our fictional protagonists to know as much about the chemical details of their ancestry as Victorian heroes knew about their estates. If so, Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides) is ahead of the game. His beautifully written novel begins: “Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce’s study, ‘Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites.’ ” The “me” of that sentence, “Cal” Stephanides, narrates his story of sexual shifts with exemplary tact, beginning with his immigrant grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty. On board the ship taking them from war-torn Turkey to America, they married-but they were brother and sister. Eugenides spends the book’s first half recreating, with a fine-grained density, the Detroit of the 1920s and ’30s where the immigrants settled: Ford car factories and the tiny, incipient sect of Black Muslims. Then comes Cal’s story, which is necessarily interwoven with his parents’ upward social trajectory. Milton, his father, takes an insurance windfall and parlays it into a fast-food hotdog empire. Meanwhile, Tessie, his wife, gives birth to a son and then a daughter-or at least, what seems to be a female baby. Genetics meets medical incompetence meets history, and Callie is left to think of her “crocus” as simply unusually long-until she reaches the age of 14.”

“With a sure yet light-handed touch,” writes Booklist, “Eugenides skillfully bends our notions of gender as we realize, along with Cal, that although he has been raised as a girl, he is more comfortable as a boy. Although at times the novel reads like a medical text, it is also likely to hold readers in thrall with its affecting characterization of a brave and lonely soul and its vivid depiction of exactly what it means to be both male and female.”

Here’s an excerpt from Middlesex:

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce’s study, “Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,” published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you’ve seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity. That’s me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes.

My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license (from the Federal Republic of Germany) records my first name simply as Cal. I’m a former field hockey goalie, long-standing member of the Save-the-Manatee Foundation, rare attendant at the Greek Orthodox liturgy, and, for most of my adult life, an employee of the U.S. State Department. Like Tiresias, I was first one thing and then the other. I’ve been ridiculed by classmates, guinea-pigged by doctors, palpated by specialists, and researched by the March of Dimes. A redheaded girl from Grosse Pointe fell in love with me, not knowing what I was. (Her brother liked me, too.) An army tank led me into urban battle once; a swimming pool turned me into myth; I’ve left my body in order to occupy others—and all this happened before I turned sixteen.

But now, at the age of forty-one, I feel another birth coming on. After decades of neglect, I find myself thinking about departed great aunts and -uncles, long-lost grandfathers, unknown fifth cousins, or, in the case of an inbred family like mine, all those things in one. And so before it’s too late I want to get it down for good: this rollercoaster ride of a single gene through time. Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! Sing how it bloomed two and a half centuries ago on the slopes of Mount Olympus, while the goats bleated and the olives dropped. Sing how it passed down through nine generations, gathering invisibly within the polluted pool of the Stephanides family. And sing how Providence, in the guise of a massacre, sent the gene flying again; how it blew like a seed across the sea to America, where it drifted through our industrial rains until it fell to earth in the fertile soil of my mother’s own Midwestern womb.

Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That’s genetic, too…

Continue Reading Here

Eugenides also reads a portion of Middlesex at the Prague Writers Festival here:

Oprah also has a list of of book club questions for discussing Middlesex:

1. Describing his own conception, Cal writes: “The timing of the thing had to be just so in order for me to become the person I am. Delay the act by an hour and you change the gene selection” (p. 11). Is Cal’s condition a result of chance or of fate? Which of these forces governs the world as Cal sees it?
2. When Tessie and Milton decide to try to influence the sex of their baby, Desdemona disapproves. “God decides what baby is,” she says. “Not you” (p. 13). What happens when characters in the novel challenge fate?
3. “All I know is this: despite my androgenized brain, there’s an innate feminine circularity in the story I have to tell” (p. 20). What does Cal mean by this? Is his manner of telling his story connected to the question of his gender? How?
4. Calliope is the name of the classical Greek muse of eloquence and epic poetry. What elements of Greek mythology figure into Cal’s story? Is this novel meant to be a new “myth”?

More Book Club Questions

Going through our email, eHarlequin.com wins the prize for the biggest stretch for a Father’s Day promotion.

The offer reads: “Throughout the month of June, we celebrate our dads. This Father’s Day promotion features books with men your father warned you about. When visitors purchase 4 or more featured books they will get a 5th book free!”

What? That’s not a Father’s Day promotion! It’s not even a gift for dad. Memo to eHarlequin marketing: Just because there’s a holiday, doesn’t mean you have to force a tie in.

We’ll just stick to calling it a buy-4-get-1-free promo. If you’d like to take advantage of it, click here.

eHarlequin.com also has a more straight forward offer. Get Free Shipping until July 31. Coupon Code: “WELCOME”.

Or, get 2 Free books and a Free gift from Harlequin Presents, with this link.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon’s sixth novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, has been holding strong among the top of the bestsellers lists. He recently sat down with the Borders Book Club to discuss the novel.

Chabon tackles an alternate-history story based on the premise of a Jewish homeland established in Alaska as a safe zone for European Jews fleeing Hitler. The “what if” scenario is based up the King-Havenner bill or Alaska Development Plan that was proposed prior to the U.S. involvement in World War II. What if the bill was passed? Chabon uses this as the setting for a present-time murder mystery. Detective Meyer Landsman works the case of an execution-style killing, while trying to redeem himself, personally, as well as to his ex-wife. 

“To me it’s a love story essentially,” Chabon says in the book club video. “For me it is a story of these two people and their having to make a new place for themselves and their relationship in this rapidly changing world.”

For Chabon, creating this entire new world wasn’t a stretch.

“Writing all started for me with making up imaginery kingdoms. Filling notebooks with maps, chronologies of invented histories,” he says. “I loved fantasies when I was a kid. I loved Tolkien and I loved all the aparatus that came around the Lord of the Rings of the charts and the maps and the chronologies, all that stuff. And very early on I would start making my own. Writing this novel in many ways is a return to that.”

He wrote a 600-page draft of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in first person, past tense. He scrapped it and reworked it in in third person, present tense. He said maintaining a sense of immersion in the work is crucial.

“To write a novel at your very best you have to really just be always with your head in the book, even when you are not writing,” Chabon says. “So that as you’re going through your day when you are encountering people, overhearing people’s conversations, reading something in the newspaper or just taking a walk and thinking, you’re always writing. It’s always feeding and you are thinking, ‘Oh, I could use that’ or ‘That’s just what I need.’ That’s a magical state to be in.”

Watch the full Borders Book Club discussion with Chabon, here.

Listen to an audio excerpt of the book, here.

Chabon also did a reading at a Barnes and Noble in San Jose, Calif. In these two videos, he talks about the book, about his influences and how he goes about writing a novel.

Watch Part 2 of the video here.

The audio version of this book is also available for instant download at these sites:

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Author Jodi Picoult left for a book tour to promote her new novel, Nineteen Minutes — a story about bullying in high schools and horrific revenge — when news about the tragic mass murder at Virginia Tech took place.

Picoult's 14th novel was already on the New York Times bestsellers list at the time the tragedy struck. Now, an already sensitive topic seems to have found itself cast in a profoundly different emotional light.

She released the following statement on her web site, "As a parent, my deepest sympathy goes out to the victims and families of the Virginia Tech community. Although shootings on college campuses are often motivated by different factors than the ones I researched for high school shootings in 19 Minutes, any time something like this happens it is tragic and raises questions. However, the one we should be asking right now is: How can we help this community heal?”

With the release of Picoult's novel last month, Borders Book Club sat down with the author to discuss the book. Even though this Borders Book Club was filmed prior to the Virginia Tech shootings, it was an emotional discussion, nonetheless — particulary as Picoult recalls the research she did for the novel at Columbine. "A lot of the details that you saw in the book came right out of the mouths of those sheriffs that I spoke to."

The Chicago Tribune writes about the intersection between fiction and reality:

Yet reading "Nineteen Minutes" in the immediate wake of the Blacksburg massacre reveals many aspects in common, too: Peter Houghton, the shooter in the novel, is a sullen, disaffected loner who is bullied or ignored by his classmates, much as Cho seems to have been. The adults in "Nineteen Minutes" ask themselves the same questions that Cho's family members must be asking privately. "There was the finest line between unique and odd," one of Picoult's characters muses, "between what made a child grow up to be as well-adjusted as Thomas versus unstable, like Peter. Did every teenager have the capacity to fall on one side or the other of that tightrope, and could you identify a single moment that tipped the balance?"

Peter's thoughts, too, seem chillingly close to what Cho's might have been: "You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can't even remember what it was like."

…The timing of Picoult's novel, published within weeks of Cho's vicious rampage, was accidental. But in its depiction of a serene, ordinary world blown apart by the rage of a single individual, her story — all too tragically — is timeless.

Here is the collection of videos with Picoult as she discusses her novel last month with the Borders Book Club cast, who discuss their perspectives as not only readers, but parents. The first video is shown below, the others are linked afterward, followed by book cub questions from Picoult's web site. "I would never have written about this right after Columbine. I actually think that is such a raw piece of American history," Picoult said at the time of this filming:

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 2 )

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 3 )

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 4 )

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 5 )

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 6 )

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 7 )

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 8 )

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 9 )

The following are book club questions provided by Picoult's web site for those who have read the novel Nineteen Minutes:

Book club discussion questions for Nineteen Minutes

1. Alex and Lacy’s friendship comes to an end when they discover Peter and Josie playing with guns in the Houghton house. Why does Alex decide that it’s in Josie’s best interest to keep her daughter away from Peter? What significance is there to the fact that Alex is the first one to prevent Josie from being friends with Peter?

2. Alex often has trouble separating her roles as a judge and a mother. How does this affect her relationship with Josie? Discuss whether or not Alex’s job is more important to her than being a mother.

3. A theme throughout the novel is the idea of masks and personas, and pretending to be someone you’re not. To which characters does this apply, and why?

4. At one point defense attorney Jordan McAfee refers to himself as a “spin doctor,” and he believes that at the end of Peter’s trial he “will be either reviled or canonized” (250). What is your view of Jordan? As you were reading the book, did you find it difficult or not to remain objective about the judicial system’s standing that every defendant (no matter how heinous his or her crime) has the right to a fair trial?

5. Peter was a victim of bullying for twelve years at the hands of certain classmates, many of whom repeatedly tormented him. But he also shot and killed students he had never met or who had never done anything wrong to him. What empathy, if any, did you have for Peter both before and after the shooting?

6. Josie and Peter were friends until the sixth grade. Is it understandable that Josie decided not to hang out with Peter in favor of the popular crowd? Why or why not? How accurate and believable did you find the author’s depiction of high school peer pressure and the quest for popularity? Do you believe, as Picoult suggests, that even the popular kids are afraid that their own friends will turn on them?

7. Josie admits she often witnessed Matt’s cruelty toward other students. Why then does it come as such a surprise to Josie when Matt abuses her verbally and physically? How much did you empathize with Josie?

8. Regarding Lacy, Patrick notes that “in a different way, this woman was a victim of her son’s actions, too” (53). How much responsibility do Lewis and Lacy bear for Peter’s actions? How about Lewis in particular, who taught his son how to handle guns and hunt?

9. At one point during Peter’s bullying, Lacy is encouraged by an elementary school teacher to force Peter to stand up for himself. She threatens to cancel his playdates with Josie if he doesn’t fight back. How did you feel, when you read that scene? Do you blame Lacy for Peter’s future actions because of it? Do you agree or disagree with the idea that it a parent’s job to teach a child the skills necessary to defend himself?

10. Discuss the novel’s structure. In what ways do the alternating narratives between past and present enhance the story? How do the scenes in the past give you further insight into the characters and their actions, particularly Peter and Josie?

11. When Patrick arrives at Sterling High after the shooting, “his entire body began to shake, knowing that for so many students and parents and citizens today, he had once again been too late” (24). Why does Patrick blame himself for not preventing an incident he had no way of knowing was going to happen?

12. Dr. King, an expert witness for the defense, states that Peter was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of chronic victimization. “But a big part of it, too,” he adds, “is the society that created both Peter and those bullies” (409). What reasons does Dr. King give to support his assertion that society is partly to blame for Peter’s actions as well as those of the bullies? Do you agree with this? Why or why not?

13. Why does Josie choose to shoot Matt instead of shooting Peter? Why does Peter remain silent about Josie’s role in the shooting? In the end, has justice been satisfactorily dealt to Peter and to Josie?

14. Discuss the very ending of the novel, which concludes on the one-year anniversary of the Sterling High shooting. Why do you suppose the author chose to leave readers with an image of Patrick and Alex, who is pregnant? In what way does the final image of the book predict the future?

15. Shootings have occurred at a number of high schools across the country over the last several years. Did Nineteen Minutes make you think about these incidents in a more immediate way than reading about them in the newspaper or seeing coverage on television? How so? In what ways did the novel impact your opinion of the parties generally involved in school shootings—perpetrators, victims, fellow students, teachers, parents, attorneys, and law enforcement officials?
What do you think the author is proposing as the root of the problem of school violence? What have you heard, in the media and in political forums, as solutions? Do you think they will work? Why or why not?