Roman Stories
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The first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning master of the form since her number one New York Times bestseller Unaccustomed Earth.
In "The Boundary," one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker's daughter, who nurses a wound from her family's immigrant past. In "P's Parties," a Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with foreigners at their friend's yearly birthday gathering--until the husband crosses a line. And in "The Steps," on a public staircase that connects two neighborhoods and the residents who climb up and down it, we see Italy's capital in all of its social and cultural variegations, filled with the tensions of a changing city: visibility and invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home.
These are splendid, searching stories, written in Jhumpa Lahiri's adopted language of Italian and seamlessly translated by the author and by Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz. Stories steeped in the moods of Italian master Alberto Moravia and guided, in the concluding tale, by the ineluctable ghost of Dante Alighieri, whose words lead the protagonist toward a new way of life.
About this Author
JHUMPA LAHIRI is the author of five works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, The Lowland, and Whereabouts; and a work of nonfiction, In Other Words. She has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; the PEN/Hemingway Award; the PEN/Malamud Award; the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award; the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; a 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama; and the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia, for In altre parole.
Reviews
"Vivid. . . . [Roman Stories] crackles with indignation as it explores the meaning of home and the cost of exile. . . . Sentences gleam and flow, adding to the vividness and immediacy of these tales. . . . Urgent and affecting." --The Guardian
"Affecting. . . . Lahiri's return to short stories . . . is also a return to fiction that powerfully conveys her characters' valiant efforts to navigate geographic and cultural relocations and find their place in the world." --NPR
"Melancholy yet eccentric. . . . Each story is muted and elegant, laid back in style but not emotion. . . . The fluid transitions . . . elevate Roman Stories from a grouping of individual tales to a deeply moving whole." --The New York Times
"[Lahiri's] style is exquisite: intimate and detached at the same time, with carefully chosen words that weave a feel of deceptive simplicity. . . . [These stories] are impeccable as pieces of creative writing." --The Hindu
"Beautifully concise, observed with tender affection. . . . Lahiri conjures up [her characters'] private worlds, hopes, dreams, and heartbreaks with clinical precision." --MintLounge
"A work of deep contemplation. . . . Every time I think I have read the best that Lahiri has to offer, she reinvents herself and writes something even more extraordinary, more sublime." --Scroll.in
"Filled with intelligence and sorrow, these sharply drawn glimpses of Roman lives create an impressively unified effect. . . . [Roman Stories] is a brilliant return to the short story form by an author of protean accomplishments."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A dazzling collection. . . . Lahiri's luminous prose captures a side of Rome often ignored."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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