“And sometimes they are very sad” - this is the title under which the long-awaited novel by the famous American prose writer Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (2011), is published for the first time in Russian. The first resounding success came to the writer after the publication of the bestsellers “The Virgin Suicides” (1993) - the book was filmed by Sofia Coppola (1999), and “The Middle Sex” (Pulitzer Prize, 2003). The novel “And Sometimes They Are Very Sad” “- a story imbued with love, tells about graduates of Brown University in the early eighties, where Eugenides himself studied in the same years. The main characters of the book are Madeleine, who is in love with the Victorian era, who is writing a thesis on the topic “Matrimonial Plot,” and her friends – Leonard and Mitchell, their idols Eco, Derrida, Hemingway. The romantically inclined Madeleine will have to quickly grow up, going through difficult trials, and her friends - one of them will become Madeleine's husband - will feel what a deep social chasm separates them.