He tells this to a Bengali couple, with their kids, visiting from the states. In the title story, a man who is an interpreter of native Indian languages for a doctor is also a tour guide for visitors to India. Here’s a sample of what the nine stories are about: And there’s a twist to saying these stories are about “immigrants” because most folks in these stories were fully assimilated into the global upper class before they even arrived in the USA. They live in Boston townhouses and upscale suburbs. There are about 250 million Bengalis in the subcontinent, about 2/3 making up the Muslim nation of Bangladesh and about 1/3, mostly Hindus, in West Bengal, a state in India.īut, with the exception of two stories, these folks are not urban slum dogs -they are upper-income folks with PhD’s and MD’s who grew up speaking English in India and who came to the USA to be doctors, professors and engineers in the high-tech beltway bandit firms around Boston. Like the author’s other collection of shorts that I have reviewed (Unaccustomed Earth, 2008) these stories are about Bengali immigrants in the US from the Bengal area of India, around Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). How’s this for blurbs: when the female author published this collection of short stories at age 32 in 1999, she won the Pulitzer Prize, the Pen/Hemingway Award and the New Yorker’s Debut Book of the Year. She received the following awards, among others:ġ999 - PEN/Hemingway Award (Best Fiction Debut of the Year) for Interpreter of Maladies Ģ000 - The New Yorker's Best Debut of the Year for Interpreter of Maladies Ģ000 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut Interpreter of Maladies Much of her short fiction concerns the lives of Indian-Americans, particularly Bengalis. Lahiri taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has been a Vice President of the PEN American Center since 2005. In 2001, she married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then Deputy Editor of TIME Latin America Lahiri currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She took up a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997-1998). She then received multiple degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989. Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and later received her B.A.
Brought up in America by a mother who wanted to raise her children to be Indian, she learned about her Bengali heritage from an early age. Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri was born in London and brought up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island.
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