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Jhumpa Lahiri

    July 11, 1967

    Jhumpa Lahiri's writing primarily explores the lives of Indian Americans, with a particular focus on the Bengali community. Her work delves into the complexities of identity, cultural transitions, and the search for belonging. Lahiri is known for her precise prose and profound insight into the inner lives of her characters. Her narrative style is both subtle and penetrating, drawing readers deeply into the worlds she creates.

    Jhumpa Lahiri
    The lowland
    The Namesake
    The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories
    India Holy Song
    Unaccustomed Earth. Einmal im Leben, englische Ausgabe
    Interpreter of Maladies
    • In this novel, a couple exchange confessions during nightly blackouts in a Boston apartment as they struggle to cope with a heartbreaking loss.

      Interpreter of Maladies
      4.2
    • Exploring the secrets and complexities lying at the heart of family life and relationships, a collection of eight stories includes the title work, about a young mother in a new city whose father tends her garden while hiding a secret love affair.

      Unaccustomed Earth. Einmal im Leben, englische Ausgabe
      4.1
    • India Holy Song

      Novel of Aboriginal Wisdom

      • 143 pages
      • 6 hours of reading

      Xavier Zimbardo's stunning work captures the mystery, beauty, and spirituality of India through a remarkable collection of four-color photography taken over fifteen years. This extraordinary volume offers an intimate portrait of a people whose sacred rituals and way of life are among the most fascinating in the world. The oversized book features a hundred vibrant, light-filled photographs, showcasing the textile-dyeing factories of Rajasthan with their streams of jewel-like fabrics in hues from aquamarine to ruby red. It also depicts the great camel fairs of Pushkar Mela, where caravans traverse the desert, and the sculptural elegance of Chinese fishing nets in Cochin, Kerala, against a violet twilight sky. Zimbardo reveals the many facets of India with a passionate eye, making this work a treasure for photography and travel enthusiasts, as well as those interested in Indian culture. The volume includes an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jhumpa Lahiri, a prefatory text by the author detailing his experiences and artistic process, and insightful captions that illuminate Indian culture. This evocative book not only captures the essence of a place but also reflects the range of human emotion.

      India Holy Song
      3.5
    • The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

      • 528 pages
      • 19 hours of reading

      Jhumpa Lahiri's landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, including well known authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante and Luigi Pirandello, alongside many captivating rediscoveries. Poets, journalists, visual artists, musicians, editors, critics, teachers, scientists, politicians, translators: the writers that inhabit these pages represent a dynamic cross section of Italian society.

      The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories
      4.0
    • The Namesake

      • 291 pages
      • 11 hours of reading

      A young man born of Indian parents in America struggles with issues of identity from his teens to his thirties.

      The Namesake
      4.0
    • The lowland

      • 406 pages
      • 15 hours of reading

      SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2013 SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2014 SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2013 From Subhash's earliest memories, at every point, his brother was there. In the suburban streets of Calcutta where they wandered before dusk and in the hyacinth-strewn ponds where they played for hours on end, Udayan was always in his older brother's sight. So close in age, they were inseparable in childhood and yet, as the years pass - as U.S tanks roll into Vietnam and riots sweep across India - their brotherly bond can do nothing to forestall the tragedy that will upend their lives. Udayan - charismatic and impulsive - finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty. He will give everything, risk all, for what he believes, and in doing so will transform the futures of those dearest to him.

      The lowland
      4.0
    • Bone Into Stone

      • 44 pages
      • 2 hours of reading

      The Cahiers Series is delighted to publish a newly commissioned work by renowned bilingual Jhumpa Lahiri who for three years has been collaborating with her friend the classicist Yelena Baraz on a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses into English. From among the elements of transformation that have spoken to her directly and intimately she has chosen to focus here on stones: stones that turn into human beings; and, later, human beings - silenced, stilled, petrified - who will turn into stone. The connotations of stone - of rock, of pebble - pose questions of origin and destiny, immobility and unsettledness, living and dying. Lahiri's text on translation-as-metamorphosis and the protean self resonates alongside the dynamic and colourful paintings of celebrated artist Jamie Nares. These extend the exploration of metamorphosis by questioning, beautifully, the relation of the permanent to the ephemeral, the necessary to the aleatory, the completed art work to the human gesture that created it.

      Bone Into Stone
      3.0
    • The first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and master of the form since her number one New York Times best seller Unaccustomed Earth • Rome—metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical—is the protagonist, not the setting, of these nine stories In “The Boundary,” one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker’s daughter, who nurses a wound from her family’s immigrant past. In “P’s Parties,” a Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with foreigners at their friend’s yearly birthday gathering—until the husband crosses a line. And in “The Steps,” on a public staircase that connects two neighborhoods and the residents who climb up and down it, we see Italy’s capital in all of its social and cultural variegations, filled with the tensions of a changing city: visibility and invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home. These are splendid, searching stories, written in Jhumpa Lahiri’s adopted language of Italian and seamlessly translated by the author and by Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz. Stories steeped in the moods of Italian master Alberto Moravia and guided, in the concluding tale, by the ineluctable ghost of Dante Alighieri, whose words lead the protagonist toward a new way of life.

      Roman Stories
      3.8
    • Luminous essays on translation and self-translation by an award-winning writer and literary translatorTranslating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages.With subtlety and emotional immediacy, Lahiri draws on Ovid’s myth of Echo and Narcissus to explore the distinction between writing and translating, and provides a close reading of passages from Aristotle’s Poetics to talk more broadly about writing, desire, and freedom. She traces the theme of translation in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and takes up the question of Italo Calvino’s popularity as a translated author. Lahiri considers the unique challenge of translating her own work from Italian to English, the question “Why Italian?,” and the singular pleasures of translating contemporary and ancient writers.Featuring essays originally written in Italian and published in English for the first time, as well as essays written in English, Translating Myself and Others brings together Lahiri’s most lyrical and eloquently observed meditations on the translator’s art as a sublime act of both linguistic and personal metamorphosis.

      Translating Myself and Others
      3.8
    • _______________ 'A passionate love letter to language and to Italy ... a bold and quirkily engaging self-portrait' - Lee Langley, Spectator 'A writer of uncommon elegance and poise' - New York Times 'A fascinating account of her linguistic exile' - Erica Wagner, Harper's Bazaar _______________ In Other Words is a revelation. It is at heart a love story of a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on obsession: that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip to Florence after college. Although Lahiri studied Italian for many years afterwards, true mastery had always eluded her. Seeking full immersion, she decided to move to Rome with her family, for 'a trial by fire, a sort of baptism' into a new language and world. There, she began to read and to write - initially in her journal - solely in Italian. In Other Words, an autobiographical work written in Italian, investigates the process of learning to express oneself in another language, and describes the journey of a writer seeking a new voice. Presented in a dual-language format, this is a wholly original book about exile, linguistic and otherwise, written with an intensity and clarity not seen since Vladimir Nabokov: a startling act of self-reflection and a provocative exploration of belonging and reinvention.

      In Other Words
      3.8