SEED IDEAS
Explore SEED IDEAS: a curated reading list of books & photography on identity, America, and transformation. Featuring Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and Our America by Lealan Jones—discover powerful narratives to inspire your next creative project or book club pick.
Book
Our America
by Lealan Jones
The award-winning creators of National Public Radio's "Ghetto Life 101" and "Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse" combine talents with a young photographer to show what life is like in one of the country's darkest places: Chicago's Ida B. Wells housing project. Photos.
Book
Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license...records my first name simply as Cal." So begins the breathtaking 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. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic. Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
