jhumpa lahiri

  • Switching Languages

    At the Guardian, Jhumpa Lahiri recounts the path that led her to write her latest book in Italian, though she is a non-native speaker: A week after arriving [in Rome], I open my diary to describe our misadventures and I…

  • Language and Exile

    Over at the New Yorker, writer Jhumpa Lahiri has written a hauntingly beautiful personal essay about learning Italian, leaving English, and finding her voice in linguistic exile: How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn’t mine?…

  • The Rumpus Interview with Mia Alvar

    The Rumpus Interview with Mia Alvar

    Author Mia Alvar discusses her debut short story collection, In the Country, fictional motherhood, literature’s role in society, and the limits of belonging to a place.

  • JHUMPA LAHIRI’S LOWLAND

    The final key moment was when, suddenly, I was able to write the novel without feeling as though I needed the crutch of all the research and all of the books, and I felt that the characters were strong enough…

  • What Jhumpa Lahiri is Reading

    If certain books are to be termed immigrant fiction, what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn’t agree with me. Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant…

  • Charged Sentences

    “It is by fussing with sentences that a character becomes clear to me, that a plot unfolds. To work on them so compulsively, perhaps prematurely, is to see the trees before the forest. And yet I am incapable of conceiving…

  • The Cost of Living

    A new volume of stories by Mavis Gallant traces the writer’s development from early stories of bewilderment and disappointment to the sharp, incisive later work of a master.

  • Notable New York, This Week 10/5-10/11

    MONDAY, October 5, 2009 – SUNDAY October 11, 2009 This week in New York, Stephen Elliott reads from his memoir The Adderall Diaries, which has its East Coast Launch with n+1, Spike Jonze week in New York, Sufjan Stevens performs,…