Awards
2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
From Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
International Bestseller • Winner of the Pulitzer Prize • PEN/Hemingway Award Winner
With a New Foreword by Domenico Starnone
This stunning debut collection unerring charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. In stories that travel from India to America and back again, Lahiri speaks with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner.
Review
"Lahiri's touch in these nine tales is delicate, but her observations remain damningly accurate, and her bittersweet stories are unhampered by nostalgia." Publishers Weekly
Review
"[Lahiri] announces herself as a wonderfully distinctive new voice....She is a writer of uncommon elegance and poise...a precocious debut." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
"[P]olished and resonant....Moving and authoritative pictures of culture shock and displaced identity." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"One of Lahiri's gifts is the ability to use different eyes and voices. Readers who enjoy these stories should also appreciate the work of Bharati Mukherjee and G. S. Sharat Chandra." Mary Ellen Quinn, Booklist
Review
"Dazzling writing....Simply put, Lahiri displays a remarkable maturity and ability to imagine other lives....[E]ach story offers something special. Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies will reward readers." USA Today
Review
"Lahiri's language is uncluttered; she's sparing with metaphor, and the riches accumulate unobtrusively." Laura Shapiro, Newsweek
Review
"[A]side from her eloquence, there are two things...that make this a stunning literary debut. One is her spectactular ability to portray characters who are unassuming....The other is her talent for making stories featuring these same characters remarkably suspenseful." New York Newsday
Review
"[Lahiri] breathes unpredictable life into the page, and the reader finishes each story...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." Caleb Crain, The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland; and a work of nonfiction, In Other Words. She has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; the PEN/Hemingway Award; the PEN/Malamud Award; the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award; the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; a 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama; and the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia, for In altre parole.