“Jhumpa Lahiri is the kind of writer who makes you want grab the next person you see and say “Read this!” She’s a dazzling storyteller with a distinctive voice, an eye for nuance, an ear for irony. She is one of the finest short story writers I’ve read” – Amy Tan

When you read such praising words for some storyteller, you don’t think twice before picking up her book as your TBR. Jhumpa Lahiri is Bengali storyteller born in England and brought up in Rhod Island USA. There’s a debate about her ‘Indian’ness as she hasn’t been in India for a major part of her life, but her stories revolve around Indians and Indian migrants in the west. Many of her stories are published in the American journal The New Yorker including The Long Way Home and Cooking Lessons. Her debut story “collection Interpreter of Maladies has won a prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is my pick for this TBR entry of Adi’s Journal.

 

The stories in this collection revolve around the lives of Indian immigrants focusing on the issues like generation gap between the first and second generation of Indian Americans, loss of a child and failing marriage, demanding jobs of a new society and the culture shocks they receive. She later wrote in one of her essay on in Newsweek (http://www.newsweek.com/my-two-lives-106355), “When I first started writing I was not conscious that my subject was the Indian-American experience. What drew me to my craft was the desire to force the two worlds I occupied to mingle on the page as I was not brave enough, or mature enough, to allow in life.”

 

I personally believe that “Whether set in Boston or Bengal, these sublimely understated stories, spiced with humour and subtle detail, speak with universal eloquence to anyone who has ever felt the yearnings of exile or the emotional confusion of the outsider.” as mentioned in the blurb of Interpreter of Maladies. I am going to pick this book as soon as I am finished with my current readings. The book has just over 200 pages and that’s the length I enjoy most than lengthy volumes. So, guys if you also like grab this collection, go visit a nearby bookshop or click on the following link

Amazon

Flipkart

Paperback: 208 pages

Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers India; (Reissue) edition (5 September 2005)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 817223502X

ISBN-13: 978-8172235024

---

 

I am adding this to the amazing bucket of blogs at #BlogchatterA2Z.