Interpreter of Maladies

Most of the short stories in this debut volume are about marriage in one form or another. A New York Times Notable Book in 1999, this book also won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

"...Jhumpa Lahiri traces the lives of people on two continents--North America and India--and in doing so announces herself as a wonderfully distinctive new voice. Indeed, Ms. Lahiri's prose is so eloquent and assured that the reader easily forgets that INTERPRETER OF MALADIES is a young writer's first book." - John R. Oneal (New York Times, 8/6/99)

"A sense of isolation and displacement permeates these stories, nearly all of which are about people who, like the author, were born of Bengali parents but now live in the United States....Jhumpa Lahiri's strength as a writer stems partly from her ability to delineate in telling detail the mores of both societies....There are...many good writers of Indian origin who recall with troubled nostalgia a past they do not want to return to but somehow hope to resolve by explaining it in fictional form. Lahiri joins the ranks of those whose work goes further and illuminates human nature in general." - Susan Perl (Times Literary Supplement, 10/22/99)

"In these stories she exercises fine judgment in cutting out each precise narrative shape; but her hand is hidden in her sleeve, so that her narratives, like Alice Munro's, seem to have found their natural, sinuous, organic form." - Akira Yachi (New York Review of Books, 02/29/2001)

"Lahiri's characters are charmers....She breathes unpredictable life into the page, and the reader finishes each story reseduced, wishing he could spend a whole novel with its characters. There is nothing accidental about her success; her plots are as elegantly constructed as a fine proof in mathematics." - Alexis G. Clare (New York Times Book Review, 7/11/99)

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