Jhumpa Lahiri Popular Books
Jhumpa Lahiri Biography & Facts
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri (born July 11, 1967) is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian. Her debut collection of short-stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name. The Namesake was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and was made into a major motion picture. Unaccustomed Earth (2008) won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, while her second novel, The Lowland (2013) was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. On January 22, 2015, Lahiri won the US$50,000 DSC Prize for Literature for The Lowland. In these works, Lahiri explored the Indian-immigrant experience in America. In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome, Italy and has since then published two books of essays, and in 2018, published her first novel in Italian called Dove mi trovo and also compiled, edited and translated the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories which consists of 40 Italian short stories written by 40 different Italian writers. She has also translated some of her own writings and those of other authors from Italian into English. In 2014, Lahiri was awarded the National Humanities Medal. She was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University from 2015 to 2022. In 2022, she became the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at her alma mater, Barnard College of Columbia University. Early and personal life Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Indian immigrants from the Indian state of West Bengal. Her family moved to the United States when she was three; Lahiri considers herself an American and has said, "I wasn't born here, but I might as well have been." Lahiri grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where her father Amar Lahiri worked as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island; the protagonist in "The Third and Final Continent", the story which concludes Interpreter of Maladies, is modeled after him. Lahiri's mother wanted her children to grow up knowing their Bengali heritage, and her family often visited relatives in Calcutta (now Kolkata). When Lahiri began kindergarten in Kingston, Rhode Island, her teacher decided to call her by her familiar name Jhumpa because it was easier to pronounce than her more formal given names. Lahiri recalled, "I always felt so embarrassed by my name.... You feel like you're causing someone pain just by being who you are." Her ambivalence over her identity was the inspiration for the mixed feelings of Gogol, the protagonist of her novel The Namesake, over his own unusual name. In an editorial in Newsweek, Lahiri claims that she has "felt intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new." Much of her experiences growing up as a child were marked by these two sides tugging away at one another. When she became an adult, she found that she was able to be part of these two dimensions without the embarrassment and struggle that she had when she was a child. Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College of Columbia University in 1989. Lahiri then earned advanced degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Literature, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. Her dissertation, completed in 1997, was titled Accursed Palace: The Italian Palazzo on the Jacobean Stage (1603–1625). Her principal advisers were William Carroll (English) and Hellmut Wohl (Art History). She took a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997–1998). Lahiri has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2001, Lahiri married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then deputy editor of TIME Latin America, and who is now its senior editor. In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome with her husband and their two children, Octavio (born 2002) and Noor (b. 2005). On July 1, 2015, Lahiri joined the Princeton University faculty as a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts. Literary career Lahiri's early short stories faced rejection from publishers "for years". Her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, was finally released in 1999. The stories address sensitive dilemmas in the lives of Indians or Indian immigrants, with themes such as marital difficulties, the bereavement over a stillborn child, and the disconnection between first and second generation United States immigrants. Lahiri later wrote, "When I first started writing I was not conscious that my subject was the Indian-American experience. What drew me to my craft was the desire to force the two worlds I occupied to mingle on the page as I was not brave enough, or mature enough, to allow in life." The collection was praised by American critics, but received mixed reviews in India, where reviewers were alternately enthusiastic and upset Lahiri had "not paint[ed] Indians in a more positive light." Interpreter of Maladies sold 600,000 copies and received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (only the seventh time a story collection had won the award). In 2003, Lahiri published her first novel, The Namesake. The theme and plot of this story was influenced in part by a family story she heard growing up. Her father's cousin was involved in a train wreck and was only saved when the workers saw a beam of light reflected off of a watch he was wearing. Similarly, the protagonist's father in The Namesake was rescued because his peers recognized the books that he read by Russian author Nikolai Gogol. The father and his wife emigrated to the United States as young adults. After this life-changing experience, he named his son Gogol and his daughter Sonali. Together the two children grow up in a culture with different mannerisms and customs that clash with what their parents have taught them. A film adaptation of The Namesake was released in March 2007, directed by Mira Nair and starring Kal Penn as Gogol and Bollywood stars Tabu and Irrfan Khan as his parents. Lahiri herself made a cameo as "Aunt Jhumpa". Lahiri's second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, was released on April 1, 2008. Upon its publication, Unaccustomed Earth achieved the rare distinction of debuting at number 1 on The New York Times best seller list. New York Times Book Review editor, Dwight Garner, stated, "It's hard to remember the last genuinely serious, well-written work of fiction—particularly a book of stories—that leapt straight to No. 1; it's a powerful demonstration of Lahiri's newfound commercial clout." In February 2010, she was appointed a member of the Committee on the Arts and Humanities, along with five other.... Discover the Jhumpa Lahiri popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Jhumpa Lahiri books.
Best Seller Jhumpa Lahiri Books of 2024
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Whereabouts
Jhumpa LahiriNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies about a woman questioning her place in the world, ...
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Roman Stories
Jhumpa Lahiri & Todd PortnowitzA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORKER, NPR The first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and master of the form since her number one New York Times ...
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The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction
Lex WillifordFifty remarkable short stories from a range of contemporary fiction authors including Junot Diaz, Amy Tan, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, and more, selected from a survey of more ...
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The Moon and the Bonfires
Cesare Pavese & Tim Parks'Insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive' The New York Times Book ReviewA new translation by Tim ParksTwenty years after making his fortune in America, Eel is drawn back to t...
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Reading Jhumpa Lahiri
Nilanjana ChatterjeeThis book is an innovative and rigorous study of Jhumpa Lahiri's Indian American female characters' lived and imagined diasporic house space, using domesticity and the house as an ...
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This Time Of Morning
Nayantara SahgalThis unusually prescient novel is set in the early postIndependence years, when a new republic eagerly looks forward to a future full of hope. Rakesh, a Foreign Service officer who...
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Unaccustomed Earth
Jhumpa Lahiri#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Interpreter of Maladies: These eight stories take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand...
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Day of Reckoning
Nayantara SahgalEven before Indian writing in English became the fashionable thing it is today, Nayantara Sahgal was a name to reckon with internationally. In Day of Reckoning: Stories, her first ...
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The Clothing of Books
Jhumpa LahiriA deeply personal reflection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Namesake that explores the art of the book jacket from the perspectives of both reader and writer. How do...
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Land Where I Flee
Prajwal ParajulyTo commemorate Chitralekha Nepauney's Chaurasi her landmark 84th birthday three of Chitralekha's grandchildren are travelling to Gangtok, Sikkim, to pay their respects. Agastaya ...
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Relationship
Nayantara SahgalIn this exchange of letters dating from an extremely turbulent period of their lives, Nayantara Sahgal and E.N. Mangat Rai, two very public figures who had remained at the same tim...
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The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories
Bruce Fulton‘An eversurprising and stylistically diverse anthology that will surely stand as the touchstone collection of Korean literature for decades to come’ Literary ReviewThis eclectic, m...
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London Labour and the London Poor
Victor Neuburg & Henry MayhewLondon Labour and the London Poor originated in a series of newspaper articles written by the great journalist Henry Mayhew between 1849 and 1850. A dozen years later, it had grown...
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Stealing the Ambassador
Sameer ParekhCaught between a father who thought success and freedom could be found only in America and a grandfather who risked his life to guarantee such ideals in their homeland of India, tw...
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Lesser Breeds
Nayantara SahgalIn 1932, Nurullah, a teacher aged twentythree, comes to the city of Akbarabad. He teaches literature to firstyears at the university and encounters a nonviolent resistance movement...
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People Person
Candice Carty-WilliamsThe author of the “brazenly hilarious, tellitlikeitis first novel” (Oprah Daily) Queenie returns with another witty and insightful “treat” (Jesse Armstrong, creator of Succession) ...
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The Archer
Shruti Swamy“Set in 1970s Bombay, the novel explores art, ambition, gender roles and class with the same shimmering prose of Swamy’s first book, the story collection A House Is a Body.”San Fra...
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The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories
Arunava Sinha & Various AuthorsA landmark new anthology of Bengali literature in English, including many previously untranslated storiesThe prose short story arrived in Bengal in the wake of British colonizers, ...
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Naming Jhumpa Lahiri
Lavina DhingraJhumpa Lahiri is among the few contemporary writers being read widely by both mainstream and minority audiences, the general public and academic scholars, in the U.S. and globally....
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As The River Flows
Ranjit BiswasA mother watches as her daughter, intent upon cleaning the house, tries to throw away a cherished piece of embroidered cloth; a father realizes that age is catching up with him whe...
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Queenie
Candice Carty-WilliamsSOON TO BE A HULU ORIGINAL SERIESONE of NPR’s and TIME’s BEST BOOKS of the YEAR NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK of the YEAR by WOMAN’S DAY, NEWSDAY, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, BUSTLE, and B...
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Selected Short Stories
Rabindranath TagorePoet, novelist, painter and musician, Rabindranath Tagore (18611941) is the grand master of Bengali culture. Written during the 1890s, the stories in this selection brilliantly rec...
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The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories
Margaret Jull Costa, Thomas Bunstead, Peter Bush, Kathryn Phillips-Miles, Simon Deefholt & Kit MaudeThis exciting collection celebrates the richness and variety of the Spanish short story, from the nineteenth century to the present day.Featuring over fifty stories selected by rev...
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In Other Words
Jhumpa Lahiri & Ann GoldsteinNATIONAL BESTSELLER The Pulitzer Prizewinning, bestselling author of The Namesake delivers a powerful meditation on the process of learning to express herself in Italian...
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Passages
Barbara H. Solomon & Eileen Panetta24 stories from today's best indian authorsIndia's literary tradition has found a growing audience around the world. Many talented writers have arrived on the scene, each illuminat...
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Prison and Chocolate Cake
Nayantara Sahgal'Seldom does one get a chance to become acquainted with India's great leaders through a young woman so intimately associated with them.'New York Times Book ReviewA dramatic portrai...
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Her Side of the Story
Alba de Céspedes, Jill Foulston & Elena Ferrante“A courageous novel, beautifully imagined and written.” Elena Lappin, The Washington Post"De Cespedes' work has lost none of its subversive force”The New York Times Book Revie...
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The Lowland
Jhumpa LahiriNational Book Award Finalist Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize From the Pulitzer Prizewinning, bestselling author of The Namesake comes an extraordinary new novel, set in b...
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The Political Imagination
Nayantara SahgalThrough the last five decades, Nayantara Sahgal has constantly responded to the changes that enveloped India and the world through her wideranging works of fiction and nonfiction. ...
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The Flea Palace
Elif ShafakBy turns comic and tragic, Elif Shafak's The Flea Palace is an outstandingly original novel driven by an overriding sense of social justice.Bonbon Palace was once a stately apartme...
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The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories
Jhumpa Lahiri'Rich. . . eclectic. . . a feast' TelegraphThis landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradi...
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Before We Visit the Goddess
Chitra Banerjee DivakaruniA beautiful, “deeply affecting” (Kirkus Reviews) novel from the bestselling, awardwinning author of Sister of My Heart and The Mistress of Spices about three generations of mothers...
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A House Is a Body
Shruti SwamyFinalist for the 2021 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award f...
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American Fever
Dur e Aziz AmnaWINNER OF THE ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN AWARD FOR LITERATURE USA Today Best books of August Christian Science Monitor Ten Best Books of August The Millions Most Anticipated ...
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Honor
Thrity UmrigarTHE JANUARY 2022 REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK “In the way A Thousand Splendid Suns told of Afghanistan’s women, Thrity Umrigar tells a story of India with the intimacy of one w...
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Hell-Heaven
Jhumpa LahiriA Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” SelectionPranab Chakraborty was a fellow Bengali from Calcutta who had washed up on the shores of Central Square. Soon he was one of the family...