"Move over, Onegin--we've a new Eugene for the ages. In Michael Weingrad's wildly charming and profound telling, young Eugene Nadelman's adolescence in 1980s Philadelphia unfolds in iambic tetrameter, with each crush and clash and heartache feeling as epic as they do for the young and the hopeful. If you've ever spun the bottle or leered furtively at someone across the dancefloor, you'll find yourself transformed by Weingrad's wit, wonder, and heart, and, like young Eugene himself, grow wiser."
--Liel Leibovitz, editor at large, Tablet Magazine

"[A] wistful and emotionally resonant novel that finds true poetry in teenage life."
--Foreword Reviews

Full of humor, pathos, and pop cultural references, Eugene Nadelman is a tale of young love and American manners in the era of Ronald Reagan and MTV--written in the witty sonnet form of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

It's 1982, and teenaged Eugene attends his cousin's bar mitzvah in suburban Philadelphia. There he meets a kindred spirit in the savvy, sensitive Abigail. But when Eugene's best friend also becomes smitten with Abby, a tragic rivalry ensues and, just as in the Pushkin poem, one character kills another in a duel. (Well, in a Dungeons & Dragons game, in this case.)

Eugene and Abby's romance deepens against a backdrop of '80s music, fashion, and VHS rentals--with serious world events like AIDS and the Cold War hovering overhead. But when Eugene leaves for sleepaway camp and Abby for Europe, temptations abound, and one question becomes paramount: can their love survive a summer separation?

Michael Weingrad is the author of American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States and the editor and translator of Letters to America: Selected Poems of Reuven Ben-Yosef. He was born and raised in Philadelphia, attending McCall and Masterman public schools. His essays and reviews, on topics ranging from Israeli fantasy and science fiction to the Jews of Baghdad, have appeared in the Jewish Review of Books, Mosaic, and a range of other magazines and scholarly journals. Weingrad has been a Fulbright Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Montague Burton Fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Leeds, and a Harry Starr Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard. Today, he is a professor of Jewish Studies and lives in Portland, Oregon.