Extreme Solitude by Jeffrey Eugenides

Here is a great story I read in the New Yorker. I had sort of fallen behind in my issues of the magazine so this one is from a few weeks back. Anyways, I really enjoyed the story. It's about two university students who meet in a Semiotics class and fall in love (oooh omg!) But really, I just like any story that takes place in University and shows the mysticism of the campus and everything that is being learned. Such mysticism is greatly shown through the discussion of semiotics (a subject that I still don't really understand--its like a sub group of literary criticism/theory, yet it deserves its own department and program, blah, blah, its a confusing subject.) Anyways here's the first paragraph (and obviously the link to the rest is below):

It was debatable whether or not Madeleine had fallen in love with Leonard the first moment she’d seen him. She hadn’t even known him then, and so what she’d felt was only sexual attraction, not love. Even after they’d gone out for coffee, she couldn’t say that what she was feeling was anything more than infatuation. But ever since the night they went back to Leonard’s place after watching “Amarcord” and started fooling around, when Madeleine found that instead of being turned off by physical stuff, as she often was with boys, instead of putting up with that or trying to overlook it, she’d spent the entire night worrying that she was turning Leonard off, worrying that her body wasn’t good enough, or that her breath was bad from the Caesar salad she’d unwisely ordered at dinner; worrying, too, about having suggested they order Martinis because of the way Leonard had sarcastically said, “Sure. Martinis. Let’s pretend we’re Salinger characters”; after having had, as a consequence of all this anxiety, pretty much no sexual pleasure, despite the perfectly respectable session they’d put together, and after Leonard (like every guy) had immediately fallen asleep, leaving her to lie awake stroking his head and vaguely hoping that she wouldn’t get a yeast infection, Madeleine asked herself if the fact that she’d just spent the whole night worrying wasn’t, in fact, a surefire sign that she was falling in love. And certainly after they’d spent the next three days at Leonard’s place having sex and eating pizza, after she’d relaxed enough to be able to come once in a while and finally to stop worrying so much about having an orgasm because her hunger for Leonard was in some way satisfied by his satisfaction, after she’d allowed herself to sit naked on his gross couch and to walk to the bathroom knowing that he was staring at her (imperfect) ass, to root for food in his disgusting refrigerator, to read the brilliant half page of philosophy paper sticking up out of his typewriter, and to hear him pee with taurine force into the toilet bowl, certainly, by the end of those three days, Madeleine knew she was in love.

But that didn’t mean she had to tell anyone. Especially Leonard.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/06/07/100607fi_fiction_eugenides#ixzz0txjVS37I