Pulitzer-prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, has gone to number 1 in The New York Times bestseller list less than two weeks after its publication on April 1. She is the only Indian novelist after Salman Rushdie to achieve the feat.
In conversation with Rediff India Abroad before the book was published, Lahiri had said that some of the stories in the collection -- a collection of eight stories, including a trio of linked tales -- are "ancient."
"They have in fact been around in my mind for more than a decade. Even as I was finishing The Namesake, I had a couple of story ideas on the backburner," she had told Rediff India Abroad Managing Editor (Features) Arthur J Pais in an exclusive interview.
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Four of the eight stories in the collection were published in The New Yorker. She wanted to work on them before she started her second novel, she added.
Lahiri was born in London in 1967 and raised in Rhode Island, New York. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she received a BA in English literature, and of Boston University, where she received an MA in English, MA in Creative Writing and MA in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a PhD in Renaissance Studies.
She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the author of two previous books. Her debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and The New Yorker Debut of the Year.
Her novel The Namesake was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and was selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. It was turned into a fine film by Mira Nair last year and became an art-house hit in America, Canada and India, earning a respectable $20 million worldwide.
There are over one million copies in print of each of Jhumpa Lahiri's first two books, which have been translated into more than 30 languages. Her new book had more than 300,000 copies printed in America alone. Just about two dozen novelists have such large printing of their work
In a business that often sees newer writers stumble after an auspicious debut, Lahiri proves with her new collection of stories that she, like Alice Munroe, has an extraordinary talent to tell stories that stay in one's mind long after we have read them, many times more than once. Like the fabled R K Narayan, Lahiri's stories may sound simple and captivating but dwell on our increasingly complicated lives, and are life-affirming, full of wisdom.
