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    Fresh Complaint
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    Fresh Complaint
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    Fresh Complaint
    Audiobook8 hours

    Fresh Complaint

    Written by Jeffrey Eugenides

    Narrated by Jeffrey Eugenides, Ari Fliakos and Cynthia Nixon

    3.5/5

    ()

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    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR
    AN EVENING STANDARD BOOK OF THE YEAR

    ‘What was it about complaining that felt so good? You and your fellow sufferer emerging from a thorough session as if from a spa bath, refreshed and tingling?’

    The first-ever collection of short stories from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies.

    We meet Kendall, a failed poet who, envious of other people’s wealth during the real estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; and Mitchell, a lovelorn liberal arts graduate on a search for enlightenment; and Prakrti, a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her family leads to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged academic.

    Jeffrey Eugenides’s bestselling novels Middlesex, The Virgin Suicides and The Marriage Plot have shown him to be an astute observer of the crises of adolescence, self-discovery and family love. These stories, from one of our greatest authors, explore equally rich and intriguing territory.

    Narratively compelling and beautifully written, Fresh Complaint shows all of Eugenides’s trademark humour, compassion and complex understanding of what it is to be human.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateOct 5, 2017
    ISBN9780008243814
    Unavailable
    Fresh Complaint
    Author

    Jeffrey Eugenides

    Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of three novels. His first, The Virgin Suicides (1993), is now considered a modern classic. Middlesex (2002) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and both Middlesex and The Marriage Plot (2011) were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Fresh Complaint, a collection of short stories, was published in 2017. He is a member both of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and The American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

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    Reviews for Fresh Complaint

    3.5/5

    117 ratings13 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Make note of this date in the annals of history. This is the first collection of short stories I have ever been able to read in my entire life. Usually I get a page or two into a short story and slam the book shut with a "Nope! Can't."

      But Jeffrey Eugenides, brilliant author of Middlesex and The Marriage Plot, writes short stories that could easily be chapters out of a full-length book.

      The one with the two friends, one of which has dementia. (My favorite)
      The one with the guy who refuses to take the pills.
      The one with the turkey baster.
      The one with the clavichord and the Mice 'n' Warm mice.
      The one with the timeshare and the dad who can't pee.
      The one with the restraining order.
      The one with the sexologist.
      The one with the artichokes.
      The one with the embezzlers.
      The one with the arranged marriage.

      So now the question is, was this just a fluke or could I easily pick up another book of short stories and read them straight through? Dunno. Time will tell.
    • 3/5
      A nice collection of short stories written in a course of 20 years. Despite the time span, humanity has not changed much and the common theme for the stories is a life going somewhat wrong - or at least not ideally. Perhaps someone would call it a failure, but in these stories it looks simply humane. Many of the stories is about poverty or career not going as planned, divorce or other problems in love life. In a way the characters are victims of circumstances, but, however, the circumstances are not to blame as the individuals do not make the best choices. The choices are still understandable as they are a very human way to react. The characters could still choose differently, but they fail to take a look at their lives from outside and learn and perhaps change their ways. Or maybe they do, the stories have open ends, which is fitting when describing an event in a person's life.
    • 4/5
      These stories were really good. Jeffrey Eugenides is an exceptional author. I had a couple of favorites: The Baster and the title story, Fresh Complaint.
    • 3/5
      This collection of short stories was an interesting introduction to an author I have not yet read. He does a great job at looking at the complexities of human relationships: why we allow ourselves to suffer, how we use others for our own benefit under the most benign guises, how we fight against some of the self-imposed parameters we have due to our own choices. Not pretty. But touching and relatable and definitely intriguing from a "gaper's block" point of view. Chicago figures prominently in a couple stories which was a bonus.
    • 2/5
      Middlesex is one of my all-time favorite books. I think that Eugenides walks on water. Assuming those statements are true, why is that I can't remember a single story from this collection and I only read it last month? I guess "Baster" is the most memorable but I only recall that because it was on the New Yorker podcast The Author's Voice.

      I just didn't get a lasting impression from any of the stories. Pains me to give Eugenides 2 stars, but in the truest Goodreads 2-star-sense: "it was ok."
    • 5/5
      Eugenides brings his formidable writing talents to the short story genre -- without exception, all are intriguing. Fresh Complaint is especially good: high school East Indian girl commits a rash act to escape a planned marriage with unintended consequences.
    • 3/5
       Fresh Complaints felt a little lacklustre in a way. The stories were well constructed, the characters interesting (sometimes infuriating) but I felt unmoved. My expectations may have been set artificially high.
    • 5/5
      I have previously read Middlesex and Marriage Plot by Eugenides and loved them both. Unlike some of the reviewers, I thought this collection was terrific. The stories varied across subject matter but they basically put their characters in uncomfortable situations where their decision making created their problems. The stories were written over many years so they dealt with different timeframes and cultural situations. This book is a perfect introduction to a great author who just doesn't write enough. If you enjoy this collection then you are in for a real treat. Start with Middlesex which won the Pulitzer Prize for literature.
    • 3/5
      Some really good stories, but overall felt disjointed and uneven. Book designers take note, the plastic book jacket is disgusting, already falling apart and disintegrating on first read.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed most of the short stories in this collection. The writing was impeccable. Some of the subject matters were a little hard to read.
    • 3/5
      I feel ripped off. Most of the stories were good, but 8 of the 10 stories had been previously published, mostly in the New Yorker. As a New Yorker subscriber, I had already paid for the right to read most of this book. Having to pay a second time, for the same material, seems wrong. I was expecting to read some new Eugenides material, in exchange for buying this book. My complaint: too little fresh material.
    • 2/5
      Usually in a collection of short stories by a single author there are a few duds; stories that you begin forgetting as soon as you've turned the last page. And there are a few that are fine and at least one that knocks your socks off and leave you light-headed. In a good collection, they'll be a few stories of the knock-out variety and in a great collection, there might be three or four. Fresh Complaint, Jeffrey Eugenides's collection of short stories falls short of even the first variety. Composed over several decades, the stories here are often stale, usually forgettable and in a few cases, misguided to an unsettling degree. Eugenides is a great novelist, one who does amazing things when given the room to develop his characters and his story, but when restricted to a minimal length, he shows that he's not able to create characters that are anything other than one-note. His stories (with a single exception) center on white middle-aged men of the hapless variety. It's not a type that lacks for representation in American literature, but fine, Eugenides is writing-what-he-knows or something like that, but these sad sack men are written so carelessly as to make any sort of connection or sympathy for them impossible to achieve. I watched them flail and didn't care much one way or the other how things panned out. There were things I did like. Eugenides writes well, and the stories that involved characters from The Marriage Plot and Middlesex had interest for me as someone who loved both those novels, although they brought nothing new to the table, it was at least interesting to see Eugenides develop his ideas. And the single story that wasn't about a middle-aged white dude had a little meat to it. Were that it, this would be a lackluster, but fine collection by an author whose heart doesn't beat for brevity. But there were two stories that were much worse than they should have been. One, Capricious Gardens concerns a well-off middle-aged divorced man who picks up a hitch-hiking tourist, an attractive young woman, and offers her lodging at a house he occasionally lives in. Unfortunately, the attractive young woman has a traveling companion who is less attractive and who thwarts the guy's plans of conquest. The story appeared to be aiming for screw-ball comedy, and ended up feeling skeevy, with the middle-aged man's attempted seduction of a woman half his age. But this was written decades ago, and a pass of sorts might be given for a story written in the 80s. Inclusion in this book, however, is less excusable. And, finally, the newest story in the collection involved a teenage girl sexually preying on a much, much older and more powerful man. There was just so much wrong in this tale of a married man who innocently begins a sexual relationship with a teenager that it soured my view of the author.
    • 4/5
      I have a complaint: Jeffrey Eugenides doesn't write enough.Eugenides's first novel was published in 1993. Since then he's written two more novels and this, Fresh Complaint, his collection of short stories. There have been exactly nine years between each novel. So I was excited when, after reading his third novel in 2011, I read in an interview with Eugenides where he said he would not take the normal nine years to publish his next work (I tried to find that article, but was unable to do so). So it only took six years, but if this is the product of six years I am sorely disappointed and genuinely hope that it is not another nine years before the next novel.That's not to say Fresh Complaint is a bad book. It isn't. There are some good stories in this collection. Also, there are some forgettable stories. The culmination of these creates just another “good” story collection. And being merely another “good” collection in an industry where there are many similar “good” collections means Fresh Complaint fails to stand out.What's interesting about the stories in this collection is that they run the length of Eugenides' writing career, from 1988 to the present. I continually looked for growth or distinction between the stories from different eras, but what I discovered is that Eugenides is a consistent writer. His oldest works hold up to his newest. This is a huge compliment. All these are strong in character, language, and dialogue. He constructs such vivid and realistic stories. Strong, vivid, and realistic—these stories are not necessarily achingly beautiful, they do not transcend what we've come to expect from the short story. In fact, they're pretty average amongst the award-winning short story writers of the last century. Average isn't bad at all, but it's not great. Still, Fresh Complaint gave me a sampling of one of my favorite contemporary authors. Fingers are crossed that it's only three or four years until his next novel, but I'm not going to get my hopes up yet.Personal favorites: “Fresh Complaint,” “Early Music,” and “Great Experiment.”