Lahiri

In Roman Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection of short stories, mysterious foreigners mingle, sometimes simply exist, in Rome. Selfies on the Spanish Steps in Rome. (Chabe01 / Wikimedia Commons) They are professors, spouses, temporary workers, tourists, refugees, children of immigrants... people from different parts of the world, all negotiating their foreignness, sometimes around pretty ordinary circumstances like a simple meal, other times facing racist attacks or hostility. Stay tuned with breaking news…

There aren’t many writers who radically remake their style over the course of their life: we might think of Joyce’s revolutions, Woolf’s renewals, or what Jeanette Winterson called the “furnace work” that Eliot undertook on his mature style for Four Quartets.Rarer still are those who change the language they write in, but to names such as Beckett and Nabokov we can add Jhumpa Lahiri. At the turn of the millennium, Lahiri was a young star of American literature, winning a Pulitzer prize for her debut, Interpreter of…