Advanced Reader copy - Enjoyed this book, really opened my eyes and made me seek out other similar books to read.

This is a good collection of short stories, where the narrators are unreliable, immoral and usually unlikeable.
I recommend for Eugenides completists, but I have to say that I enjoy his novels a bit more.

A great collection of short stories. As with most collections, I loved some and didn't like others, but to me, the good ones outweighed the bad. Would recommend.

Unfortunately I did not enjoy these short stories enough to finish the collection. No criticism of the writing but the themes and stories were just not for me.

This is a belter of a short story collection - each one packing a punch and feeling fully developed despite it's brevity. I feel like I need to read it again to appreciate it fully. Loved it.

I previously enjoyed his books but this just seemed like it was trying to be provocative for the sake of it.

This is a wonderful collection of short stories about modern life from an excellent author. I've been on a bit of a short story kick lately, because it enables me to have a small snippet of some other life lived in between reading other books that need to be read for work. For that reason, this book has been a great companion to dip in and out of whenever I have some spare minutes to read something. Recommended.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Fourth Estate for a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Short stories even better than you would expect from the genius of Jeffery Eugenides. Weird and wonderful, I was left sincerely hoping that some of these characters might make a return in a longer novel one day.

Some short story collections feel disjointed, as if you're just beginning to understand the world the author built at the point where the story stops and the next one begins. This isn't the case with Eugenides' Fresh Complaint, where each story's world is so well-wrought that you slip right into the narrative as if you've always been there alongside the characters and always will be. This is a great collection of works which span the last 25 years of the author's career. Highly recommended for short story fans.

Some misses, but mostly hits in this collection. The first and final stories in particular were ones which I wish had been extended. They were long enough for us to get glimpses of Eugenides’ longform wonder, and I really hope we get a new (longer) novel from him soon.

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.

Reviews for collections of short stories are always hard to write. Should I judge the book as a whole or should I review each separate short story? Writing a short review of each story seems like a too much effort, but I believe that all those stories deserve their own judgement.

Overall those stories are about the things that Eugenides wrote beautiful novels before - about marriage and its various pitfalls, he brings a new story about intersexuality. All of the stories touch on serious and complex topics. What I love the most is that all of the characters are well-developed, they are not shadows of characters that could be properly developed only in a novel. No, they are all fully formed and seem real. I could understand them and their behaviour well. I'm amazed how well written and detailed those short stories are.

In the opening story "Complainers" a woman is struggling with accepting her friend's dementia and looks for a better life for her reminiscing on how their friendship began and how book Two Old Women impacted their friendship. Closing story is "Fresh Complaint" that with the opening one was my favourite.  How "Complainers" was hopeful and somehow happy in the tone, then "Fresh Complaint" was sad and infuriating. Indian-American woman creates a provocative plot to escape the possibility of arranged marriage. "The Oracular Vulva" with researcher famous for his gender studies brings back the topic of intersexuality that the author explored in Middlesex. "Early Music", "Find The Bad Guy" gives us two self-absorbed and quite pitiful male characters, in first a musician battling with responsibilities of adult life and in the second man battling with separation from his wife. There are some weaker stories, that didn't do much for me, like "Air Mail", "Baster" and "Timeshare".

What bothers me is how some feelings towards women are presented in the book. Most of the stories have a male character in the centre, and in many of them, I felt some kind of hatred towards women. I cannot fully pinpoint it, but female characters somehow less, and the male characters blamed them for their problems in a way that disturbed me. Like I said, it was not overwhelming feeling, just something that was slightly poking back of my brain. Did anyone else have this feeling? Maybe you'll be able to better articulate what was going on.

This is a wonderful collection of short stories from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides.
I had not read anything by this writer and was surprised he wrote The Virgin Suicides as I felt I should have known this already.
I was not surprised by the quality of the writing which oozes warmth and compassion on each page. He is a gifted storyteller who can take routine events and create lasting situations that reflect life in all its varied turns.
I liked Air Mail for where it took the reader. Early Music moved me as well and Timeshare brought a smile to my lips.
But truth be told I enjoyed all the stories and the rich language weaving these memorable tales.
This is the benefit of short stories they can be about subjects you would not normally look at or by new authors to you. In this way it broadens your opinions and literary influences.
As I result I know I will seek out The Virgin Suicides.

Jeffrey Eugenides has always been one of those authors I have been meaning to read. The Virgin Suicides, in large part due to Sofia Coppola's film, became one of those books I felt I would like, if only I actually sat down for it. Middlesex was a book I feel I should read, which would actually have something to teach me, if only I actually sat down for it. And so I circled around Eugenides' books for years but never taking the first step. So when I saw Fresh Complaint I figured it was about time I grabbed the proverbial bull by the horns and sat down for it. Thanks to Harper Collins and Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Fresh Complaint is a collection of beautiful short stories on that grandest of topics: the human condition. What is this human condition I speak of? It's "the characteristics, key events, and situations which compose the essentials of human existence, such as birth, growth, emotionality, aspiration, conflict, and mortality". It is no wonder almost every book finds itself questioning, describing, analysing and despairing over the human condition, since it provides so much material. In Fresh Complaint, then, Eugenides looks at all these events, characteristics and situations that create the human existence. Friendship, love, heartbreak, disappointment, anger, betrayal, it all features in the stories written by Eugenides. The stories sharply, yet also tenderly, analyse how we live, what decisions we make, how sometimes we can't help ourselves, how realisations come too late.

In Fresh Complaint, Eugenides brings together short stories written over the last twenty years. It's a nice touch to see which year each of his stories were written, as it for example explains the anger at the Bush administration in one of the stories. However, since the stories were written over such a long time, there is no single unifying theme to the collection, no clear thread that bind them all together. Occasionally links pop up between the stories, as if Eugenides almost unwittingly returned to a character or place and reused them. This lack of clear and obvious unity, however, allows Eugenides to highlight something else, namely how deeply human all his characters are, no matter their differences. Whether it's 'Baster's narrator, who bitterly watches a former love in her 40s chase after a pregnancy, 'Find the Bad Guy's husband who refuses to believe how his marriage fell apart or the title story's young woman desperately trying to escape her family's traditions, each of Eugenides' stories give us characters struggling for life, struggling through life. The stories are both sad and inspiring, beautiful and tragic. It's a perfect blend to sum up humanity.

It's always a little bit daunting, finally reading an author after years of anticipating and reading praise. But with Eugenides I found my hopes topped and fears quelled. Each story shines with a sympathy and humour that betrays a love for humanity but also an awareness for its flaws. Most of the stories will capture you straight away, as Eugenides sinks his claws into you and refuses to let you go till the last word. Dead-tired, I still tried to keep reading until my hand dropped my Kindle on my head as a clear sign that it was time to sleep. Not all the stories hit their mark, occasionally I found myself wondering what exactly Eugenides was trying to say, and yet the stories still have their own charm. The stories draw you into their own world and for the span of their pages you're deeply connected to and concerned about their characters. Eugenides manages to make his characters almost immediately recognisable, as the reader you get to know them so easily that you feel as if you've known them all along. And you care about them, as if they were your friends and neighbours. Fresh Complaint pretty much made me fall in love with Eugenides' writing and now I will finally just have to sit down for it and read his other books.

Fresh Complaint is a beautiful collection of human stories, of ups and downs, of difficulties and ridiculous situations, both intensely recognisable and strangely odd at the same time. Eugenides crafts his characters and stories carefully and there is something here for everyone. I'd recommend this to anyone interested in Short Stories and Literary Fiction.

Jeffrey Eugenides has published three novels. My first encounter with him was the fabulously dreamy Sofia Coppola film of The Virgin Suicides, which inspired me to read his next, Middlesex, an epic which intertwined history and gender and slotted nicely into that noughties patch of Great American Novels alongside the likes of Chabon and Gold. The third, though...the third I skipped. From the title The Marriage Plot in, it sounded suspiciously like generic litfic, the sort self-awareness can't save (and indeed, often further condemns). And judging from his first collection of short fiction, he's no more prolific in this field than he is with his novel per decade. This is by no means a hefty volume - fewer than 300 pages - and it collects the work of three decades. In itself, that's not a problem; what does matter is that his quality has really not been consistent through the years. The first story, about two women coming to terms with the travails of age, is beautiful. The second, about a gap year prick convinced he's attained enlightenment, is abysmal. And when you notice the 20 year gap between them, you understand exactly why. Even when the newer stuff doesn't wholly work, it is without exception vastly better than the old. 'The Oracular Vulva', from 1999, is very much a rough sketch for Middlesex, one without the space to let its research breathe and become a real story. The earliest piece, 'Capricious Gardens' is a type specimen of terrible American litfic, in which middle-aged men with failed marriages try to pull younger women, and there's miscommunication and aaaaah but never any real consideration of the fundamental seediness of it all. 29 years later, the title story revisits a not dissimilar scenario, and for all that its timing is absolutely abysmal (this was really not the best moment for a story in which a young woman falsely accuses an older, somewhat famous man of rape, however well-drawn and sympathetic her motives may be) it's so much better in every other respect - not least in the necessary awareness of the wider world and power dynamics. Even the duds do have the odd great line or phrase - I especially liked "bonneted larva" for a baby. And at its best you get something like 'Great Experiment', recalling the scope and scale of Middlesex and revisiting de Tocqueville through the prism of the second Bush back when Dubya still seemed like a nadir: "It was curious to read a Frenchman writing about America when America was small, unthreatening and admirable, when it was still something underappreciated that the French could claim and champion, like serial music or the novels of John Fante." But really I could only recommend the collection as a whole if approached with very judicious skimming and skipping according to publication date.

I was already a big Eugenides fan ever since I read Middlesex and later on with Virgin Suicides, so it was with great enthusiasm that I came across this book to review through Netgalley. It comprises 13 short stories written through a few decades, in between his other books, hence why some of his already known characters make some cameo appearances in some of the stories.
I really liked this book, as it gave me great amounts of pleasure to read while at the same time infused me with some melancholy due to the subjects being depicted. Some are very sweet and endearing, like the 2 old friends from the first story, The Complainers, others make us consider our own lives, like the ones in Baster and Capricious Gardens, and others make us cringe like the ones in The Oracular Vulva, The Great Experiment and Fresh Complaint. This last one was a big surprise, as I was struggling to finish the book.

Recommended to everyone who likes good stories, with strong themes and a dash of humour.

Fresh Complaint is less a collection of stories and more a few B sides and leftover research from his three excellent novels. I could recognise 2 or 3 stories that seemed like they were cast aside chapters from either the Marriage Plot or Middlesex. I didn't keep reading long enough to see if there were any cast offs from one of my favourite books, The Virgin Suicides.

At best (the first in the collection, certainly), the stories didn't go as far as they need to and at worst, in the story about the anthropologist, were just disappointing and uncomfortable.

I would still read a new novel from him, but these stories just seemed to have been published to remind us who Eugenedies is, while he gets ready to publish something new.

I have read about the half of the stories and did enjoy them. Unfortunately I get very confused by books of short stories as I tend to read a lot and quickly so can read several in one sitting. This feels disjointed and mars my enjoyment of each individual tale. But if you do like short stories, this is a great collection. I love Jeffrey Eugenides writing and from that point of view , this book does not disappoint

Jeffrey Eugenides's 'quirkiness' jumps at you in the theme/subject of the stories he writes: false accusation of rape; a party for sperm collection; gender fluidity and pedophilia; the psychedelic attraction of Asia and the transcendental culture or meditation etc. Yet his craftsmanship reside in the masterful way he packs so much meaning in seemingly simple stories. Don't stop at the outer layer, search deeper and you'll be rewarded.

I don’t usually read short stories but thought if I was going to try again this was the author to read.
The characters are well drawn and the stories covered some interesting interactions. Some I found engaging, others less so. Likewise the subject matter. I was frustrated that some of the stories were just that – short – I wanted to read about them in longer pieces.