Interpreter of Maladies: Stories

Jhumpa Lahiri

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999 - Fiction - 198 pages

Traveling from India to New England and back again, the stories in this extraordinary debut collection unerringly chart the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. Imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, they also speak with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. Like the interpreter of the title story -- which has been selected for both the O. Henry Award and The Best American Short Stories -- Lahiri translates between the strict traditions of her ancestors and the baffling New World. Including two stories published in The New Yorker, Interpreter of Maladies introduces, in the words of Frederick Busch, "a writer with a steady, penetrating gaze. Lahiri honors the vastness and variousness of the world."

About the author

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London, England on July 11, 1967. She received a B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989, and a M.A. in English, a M.A. in Creative Writing, a M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies from Boston University. Lahiri taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Her debut work, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000. She has also won the PEN/Hemmingway Award, an O. Henry Award, The New Yorker's best debut of the year award, and an Addison Metcalf award. Her other works include The Namesake, which was made into a movie in 2007, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland, which won 2015 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Interpreter of Maladies: Stories; A Mariner original; Mariner books
• Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999
• ISBN: 039592720X, 9780395927205
• Length: 198 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Asian American & Pacific Islander; Fiction / Literary; Fiction / Short Stories (single author)