Jeffrey Eugenides Interview: The Excitement of Writing

Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides, who finds it much harder to write short stories than long novels. Also he reflects upon the different expectations towards intellectuals in Europe and the United States.

Jeffrey Eugenides (born 1960) has become an internationally acclaimed writer through his novels The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex and The Marriage Plot. For Middlesex, he received the Pulitzer Price for fiction in 2003. In the interview Eugenides states, that even though he is attracted to writing short stories, he finds this literary form more challenging than writing long novels. In addition Eugenides admits, that even though the success of his books has made it much easier for him to live as a writer, he strives to keep himself in conditions, that remind him of his early years as an author. Thus in the late 1990s he moved to Berlin, where he could live and work incognito and concentrate on writing his novel Middelsex. Spending five years in the German capital, Eugenides recognized a huge difference concerning the role of the intellectual in Europe versus the US, where writers hardly are asked to comment on current affairs as for example the American led war in Iraq. The excerpts read by Jeffrey Eugenides are from his novel The Marriage Plot published in 2011.

Jeffrey Eugenides was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner.

Camera: Troels Kahl and Martin Kogi

Produced by: Martin Kogi and Marc-Christoph Wagner, 2012

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

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