Jumpha Lahiri
publisher
Vintage
format
Paperback
pages
352
Per Petterson
Mrs. Somebody, Somebody
Tracy Winn
With Violets
Elizabeth Robards
Bill Warrington's Last Stand
James King
Now that UNACCUSTOMED EARTH by Jumpha Lahiri is in paperback, you can
easily read it on the train, in bed, or on the subway. This is what I
call a “red light book.” It’s so good that you’ll pick it up to read
when you’re stopped at a red light!
This is a richer, fuller,
more mature Lahiri. We all loved INTERPRETER OF MALADIES and THE
NAMESAKE; this is written with deceptively simple prose. Lahiri writes
as if she’s very quietly and deliberately setting one foot down in
front of another. Then a secret explodes, there’s an encounter, a
clash, and then calm.
Lahiri’s other two books were about her
parents’ generation; this novel focuses on the lives of the children
who’ve grown up in the American education system. Lahiri is an artist
of the family portrait: she explores shades of love from ephemeral to
lifetime love; from unrequited to accommodated love; from a child’s
love for a parent to a parent’s for a child. From “Only Goodness”
“Her parents had always been blind to the things that plagued their children: being teased at
school for the color of their skin or for the funny things their mother occasionally put into their
lunch boxes, potato curry sandwiches that tinted WonderBread green. What could there
possibly be to be unhappy about? Her parents would have thought. “Depression” was a foreign
word to them, an American thing. In their opinion their children were immune from the hardships
and injustices they had left behind in India, as if the inoculations the pediatrician had given Sudha
and Rahul when they were babies guaranteed them an existence free of suffering.”
Jhumpa Lahiri was born 1967 in London, England, and raised in Rhode Island.
She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in English
literature, and of Boston University, where she received an M.A. in English,
M.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the
Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She has taught creative writing at
Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was
translated into twenty-nine languages and became a bestseller both in the United
States and abroad. In addition to the Pulitzer, it received the PEN/Hemingway
Award, the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and
Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book
Prize. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002.
The Namesake, published in September 2003, is
Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel. Her second collection, Unaccustomed Earth was published in 2008 and became an immediate New York Times #1 bestseller.
Since 2005, Lahiri has been a Vice President of the PEN American
Center, an organization designed to promote friendship and intellectual
cooperation among writers. She lives in
New York with her husband and two children.
Beyond the book