As good as ever from Eugenides - it felt very contemporary despite the varied settings. I think Eugenides is better at writing men as a whole- at times some female characters felt a little stereotypical or two dimensional, whereas the really dark humour came from male inner thoughts. This didn't impact on the skill of the writing or my enjoyment though, although some of the stories felt like they could have been expanded to fill whole books (that might be a general feeling about many short stories though).

’d really enjoyed the author’s novel Middlesex (where I discovered a dictionary’s worth of words I previously had no knowledge of) so the opportunity to read a bunch of short stories from the hand of this gifted scribbler was something I wasn’t going to pass up. All of these stories have been previously published in magazines in the period 1989 – 2013. I wouldn’t say there’s a common theme, though a sense of dissatisfaction with life or circumstance - a desire for something that is absent - seems to loom large in most of the tales.

To a large extent I wasn’t disappointed with this collection, each of the stories grabbed me quickly, was well paced and maintained sufficient energy to keep me interested throughout. I also liked the fact that there was a good dose of humour sprinkled around, even when the story was otherwise somewhat dark (e.g. Timeshare and The Bad Guy). These snippets of life are widely varied and although some grabbed me more than others I think each has something interesting to offer. My personal favourites are Early Music where a man suffering a personal financial crisis finds escape playing his clavicord (a keyboard on which he taps out ancient and obscure tunes) and Air Mail where a young man contemplates life whist suffering from a prolonged bout of diarrhea on a distant beach.

As always with these short, window views I was often left with the thought that I’d like to see more of a particular character or to have been allowed to see a scene play out to a broader conclusion. Well, the good news is that Eugenides has provided this opportunity – it appears that the character featured in Air Mail can be found in his novel The Marriage Plot. And that’s where I’ll be off to next.

An understated collection with a variety of voices depicting characters in a mix of predicaments.

This was a really high quality selection of short stories, as you would expect from Eugenides. Not all of the stories resonated with me, but they were all very well written and they all had a deeply sardonic tone that I really enjoyed. There are real people in these pages dealing with the vagaries of life in their own ways - some are dealing with overwhelming debt, some with the need for a child and others are simply trying to find themselves on a journey of discovery. What the author does so well is create vignettes about life that feel so honest and it is a testament to his talent that some of these stories date back over twenty years. As always, I look forward to the next offering from Eugenides.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Jeffrey Eumenides’ “Middlesex” is one of my favourite books so I jumped at the chance to read this collection of short stories. I should admit that I am not a short story lover, and sad,y, this book failed to change my mind. As with other collections, there were some stories I liked, some I definitely didn’t and some I was rather bored by.

For me, short stories don’t offer the chance to build a character or for the reader to get an established view of anything. They simply describe a fairly brief moment in time and then stop and in this book Eugenides proved himself to be a master of abrupt endings. I sometimes felt as if I had been left hanging and wondering what it was all about.

Each story described a crisis or crossroads of one sort or another in the protagonist’s life so most of the stories weren’t the particularly uplifting. Eugenides is undoubtedly a great, very clever and educated writer but occasionally his showcasing of his intelligence with the use of almost academic language irritated me.

Sorry, not for me I am afraid..

An interesting debut short story collection by Eugenides (I liked, in particular, his novel Middlesex from way back when). The stories are good but I can't help think that this is a collection of two halves: some are old, written for magazine publication back in the 90s; others, like the title story, new. Also, the final two stories are so different it does, in many ways, sum up the collection. The penultimate 'Great Experiment' is not the best and left me disinterested, whereas 'Fresh Complaint' is about divides in our society, between the US and UK, between different cultures and also between genders.

In my view, Eugenides is at his best when he writes about everyday life, about couples in timeshares, a professor who is lured in by the appeal of youth. He he stays away from the fantastical, I will look forward to more of his short fiction.

Short story collections can be problematic, even for the most ardent of fans of a particular author. With a novel you have time to get into the flow of the story, relate to the characters and commit to the reading process. With a short story it can be all over before it's even begun, so they require a different mindset, and although you might love one or two stories in a collection, it's equally likely there will be some you don't like. This collection by Jeffrey Eugenides has a lot to recommend it however. The stories fit well together, they explore many of the same themes and ideas and are coherent as a collection. They are well crafted and satisfying to read. There was the odd one I wished were longer, or thought would have made a cracking book, but none that I disliked. They are odd, disconcerting vignettes of modern life, snapshots of dissatisfaction, shattered dreams, mid life crises, the dilemmas of old age. They seem, as much of what Eugenides writes is, slightly otherworldly, whilst being entirely rooted in the most concrete of realities. The best of the collection reminded me strongly of the stories of Flannery O'Connor. I read the whole collection in a day, which is recommendation enough I think.

‘Fresh Complaint’ is a collection of 10 short stories by Jeffrey Eugenides. The first and last stories in the collection, ‘Complainers’ and ‘Fresh Complaint’, are new and have never been published before while the rest have appeared in the New Yorker and other magazines over the past three decades or so.

Eugenides’ three novels to date have all been completely different from the dreamy tone of ‘The Virgin Suicides’ to a Greek family saga in 20th century Detroit in ‘Middlesex’ to a love triangle between three recent graduates of a liberal arts college in ‘The Marriage Plot’. In contrast, money, debt and nostalgia appear to be loosely recurring themes in ‘Fresh Complaint’ across a similarly diverse set of scenarios which often focus on characters in some sort of personal crisis. In ‘Early Money’ a musician attempts to hide from the debt collectors tracking him down after he borrowed $27,000 to spend on a clavichord while the title story sees an Indian-American teenage girl plan her escape from the prospect of an arranged marriage which has serious consequences for a visiting British professor she encounters.

There are also a couple of early appearances of characters from his novels including Dr. Peter Luce from ‘Middlesex’ in ‘The Oracular Vulva’ while Mitchell Grammaticus from ‘The Marriage Plot’ takes centre stage in ‘Air Mail’ in which he is suffering from a bout of amoebic dysentery while travelling in Asia. Written some 15 years before Eugenides’ third and most recent novel to date, it is one of the most memorable tales here and is a good example of how ideas in short stories can be developed further down the line - characters from some of Haruki Murakami’s collections have appeared in his later novels too.

Overall, I enjoyed this collection a lot and for the most part, the stories are original and intriguing. That said, Eugenides’ novels probably remain the best introduction for readers who are new to his work and he seems to be more effective at exploring the eccentric traits of his characters in the depth and space of long-form fiction rather than the sharper precision required for short stories. It is also difficult to say if ‘Fresh Complaint’ would automatically appeal to his existing fans as his work to date has been so varied and these stories have been written over a very long period of time. However, given that his novels only appear at a current rate of one every decade or so, ‘Fresh Complaint’ should be a welcome interlude for many of those waiting for his next novel to be published. Many thanks to 4th Estate for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

I usually enjoy reading short stories and was looking forward to this book, as I heard a lot about Jeffrey Eugenides (although I haven't read any of his other books). The stories are original and well written, but although I liked some more than others, I didn't find any of them special or moving enough.
Many thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

“No one knew what the original music sounded like. You had to make an educated guess and do the best you could. (…) Sometimes you thought you heard the music, especially when you were young, and then you spent the rest of your life trying to reproduce the sound. Everybody’s life was early music.”

This collection of ten short stories covers almost three decades of Eugenides’ writing career, from 1988 to the present, and it is interesting to see how certain topics remain at the center of the author’s interest while his approach to them keeps shifting. “Fresh complaint” is a legal term, meaning that the victim of a crime, especially a sexual offense, reports the incident to someone in a position of trust, like a friend or a policeman, shortly after it happened. Clearly, fresh complaints are advantageous for criminal prosecution as possible evidence might otherwise get lost and memory tends to fade or distort the past. But Eugenides also applies the term in a more literal sense: His stories’ protagonists are all struggling with events that shaped their lives in unfortunate ways, and yes, some of them indulge in complaining. What further connects the short stories in this collection is that they contrast the idea a person has of him- or herself in her own mind with the outside reality or perception – and Eugenides excels at exploring these contrasting images, as he has already shown in Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides.

Two women who support each other when the older one, 88-year-old Della, starts to suffer from dementia, both of them taking courage from their favorite book Two Old Women: An Alaskan Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival (“Complainers”);

A backpacker (Mitchell Grammaticus from The Marriage Plot on a tropical island in the Gulf of Thailand who is trying to find enlightenment through fasting (“Air Mail”);

A man who is hurt by the fact that his former girlfriend rather wants to have a child with a sperm donor than with him (“Baster”);

A clavichord player trying to provide for his family and deeply regretting the choices he made (“Early Music”);

An elderly man who loses his fortune and tries to start a new business so his sons can have an inheritance (“Timeshare”);

A man ruminating about his marriage that has fallen apart (“Find the Bad Guy”);

A sexologist (from Middlesex) whose major findings are contested on the same day he is awarded a lifetime achievement award and who travels to Irian Jaya (now Papua) to prove his critics wrong (“The Oracular Vulva”);

A divorced man trying to seduce a young backpacker who gets interrupted by an old friend, the backpacker’s travel companion, and a number of misperceptions (“Capricious Gardens”);

An editor giving up on his long-held beliefs and trying to defraud his boss in order to benefit his family (“Great Experiment”);

An American-Indian girl who is afraid she has to enter an arranged marriage and takes extreme measures (“Fresh Complaint”) -

all of these stories are full of telling details, little hints that give way to new associations and thoughts. The character depictions and the level of empathy Eugenides employs are simply stunning: Even when he writes about terrible people (and there are a lot of dubious characters in this book), the reader cannot help but feel with them.

A really nice collection!

No complaints here!
The Marriage Plot was the first novel I read by this author and I was hooked immediately into reading everything written by him, although the short story genre is not my usual fare. So, I am relieved to discover that the skilful variety of tone and point of view in this collection of short stories act as another convincing showcase for Eugenides’ talent as a writer - and I found these vivid portrayals amusing and rewarding enough to stick with the effort of re-engaging with new characters and situations each time.
The themes include family estrangement, dislocation from community, plus an abiding sense of failure, particularly for husbands and fathers suffering from mid-life-crisis feelings of male inadequacy.
The loose thread running through the stories is revealed in the title – ‘complaint’ - which can be viewed as a medical problem, a legal issue, or as a general dissatisfaction with modern life. Even a clavichord - the expensive antique replica musical instrument in the story entitled 'Early Music' - is a complainant: “it didn't want to go back to 1761. It had done its work and wanted to rest, to retire like the audience."
Highly recommended for readers who can't face ploughing through a vast doorstop of a novel!

Short stories in length but not in power. Jeffery Eugenides doing what he does best - writing about family and people's places in them, in a way that'll make you think and make you cry in equal measure

These are very well written and I can appreciate that, but as a group it feels very bleak. These are mostly quite low key stories without a big finish or a revelation. While the topics are varied, after a while I found myself losing patience with the characters and their stories. Perhaps I'm not a big enough Eugenides reader/fan to "get" them.

I have read a couple of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novels and admired in particular his development of characters so had high hopes for this collection of short stories, published separately over a couple of decades. It seems to me that short stories must be the hardest to write, to create characters or situations that feel complete and not just leftover bits that didn’t fit into a novel. Two or three of these succeeded for me, my favourite being ‘Fresh Complaint’ itself, an intriguing and carefully balanced story involving an Indian girl threatened with arranged marriage. On the whole, though, I didn’t find myself glued to the pages. Entertaining enough, but not memorable.

I don't often read short stories but greatly enjoyed "Middlesex" and "virgin suicides" so I hoped Jeffrey Eugenides would be the author to encourage further reading of this genre. I liked the writing in them all and some have stayed with me, particularly "Baster" and the image of the children on the school bus. All the stories are written at a turning point in someone's life and capture the moment well, but thanks to Netgalley and Mr Eugenides I realise I'm probably the sort of reader who wants to know how a character got to the point and then what happened. 3.5 stars for the stories and 5 for confirming the short story format is not for me!

This is a unique and intriguing collection of short stories. They are exceedingly well written, without exception. The story range is amazing and despite being short, each has its message and it is conveyed confidently. Each story makes the reader think about the issues raised. That is an achievement with a series of short stories. I strongly recommend this collection. I loved it.

Fresh Complaint is a book of short stories by the acclaimed author of Middlesex, The Marriage Plot, and The Virgin Suicides. The stories mostly focus on characters in moments of personal crisis: money woes, relationship issues, the brink of realisation. Written and originally published across Eugenides’ career, their subject matter varies, though there are clear links to his novels in some of them. They are understated short stories for the most part, without catchy endings or big concepts, focused on people and situations.

This isn't a groundbreaking collection, but it is a solid book of short stories that provides an enjoyable, leisurely read, particularly for fans of Eugenides' style and characters.