Interpreter of Maladies: Stories of Bengal, Boston and Beyond
This Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection announces Jhumpa Lahiri as a writer of extraordinary sensitivity, turning her attention to the private griefs and displaced longings of those caught between two worlds. A Boston couple, sharing confessions in the darkness of nightly power cuts, try to hold themselves together after a shattering loss. A young student, newly arrived and waiting for the wife he has never met, finds unexpected comfort in the quiet rituals of his elderly landlady. A schoolboy watches as his childminder discovers how little it takes for an immigrant life to tip off balance, drawing her back into the pull of a distant home. Each story lands with quiet precision. Lahiri's prose is restrained and deliberate, comfortable with silence, and all the more affecting for what it chooses not to say. The writing is rich in observed detail, alive to the small textures of lives lived on the margins of belonging, and it carries a genuine emotional weight that lingers long after the final page. If you've ever felt the particular ache of being somewhere between here and there, you'll find something that speaks directly to you in these pages.
- Author: Lahiri
- Publisher: Harpercollins Publishers India
- Genre: Short Stories
- ISBN: 978-8172235024
- Pages: 208 pages