Award-winning Author Jhumpa Lahiri Scores Another Hit with Student Readers

Hundreds of freshmen filled Whitman Auditorium on Tuesday, September 9, to listen to a reading and to engage in a question-and-answer period with award-winning Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri, whose first published collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000.

All the students had been assigned to read her collection of nine short stories over the summer for their English class starting this semester. Many brought paperback copies with them to the event, which was presented by the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities in cooperation with the Department of English.

"Having to read the book over the summer was a good introduction to college," said freshman Dane St.-Cyr, of Staten Island. "It was a different kind of literature from what we read in high school. A different level, too."

Lahiri opened the program with a reading of an excerpt from one of the short stories in her book, "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine." Like many of her stories, it tells how her characters navigate between the Indian traditions of their homeland and the baffling new ways of their adopted country. After the reading, the author took questions from her audience. The questions ranged from what it was like to grow up in Rhode Island in the 1970s to the effect Barnard had on her, to her motive for choosing a particular opening for a story, to why she elected to include so much detail about the attire and food eaten by her characters.

Another freshman, Shuvro Biswas, of the Bronx, said, "The stories were all about relationships and about learning from them. It was instructive to read about how immigrants have to adapt to a new country."

Signing copies of her book at the end of the program, Lahiri paused briefly to answer questions about the event, which she said was a rarity for her these days. "I have two small kids at home right now," she explained.

She added, however, that when she was able to appear at a reading or another event involving her readers, "I’m always appreciative that they seem to have read my book so carefully that they are able to bring questions with them. Almost always they’re interested to see where the stories come from. I understand that interest very well. Stories start out in strange ways. I’m always surprised when I’ve finished a story to look back at where it began."

Since the appearance of her first collection of short stories Lahiri has published two other books: The Namesake (2003), a novel that was also turned into a movie, and Unaccustomed Earth, another collection of short stories that received the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2008.