I think we can become too fixated on who we are and where we're from. I think that identity can be a trap at times. But I think that if we take away the names of the places, the name of the city, it's more open. So I was acutely aware of place.Īnd so I think that this book really - it distills for me so many of the themes that I've been working at and worrying over in my writing from the very beginning about place and about the meaning of place. I was engaging with, absorbing a new world. And I felt that when I started writing in Italian, I had just moved to Rome, and I myself was displaced. My previous body of work - all of the work in English - was so deeply entrenched in names, places, what it meant to be from Calcutta but living in Boston. LAHIRI: This has been a choice that has been in place for more or less all of my writing in Italian. KELLY: And why hold back on all the little, identifying geographic details? You tell us we're in the piazza. The book was born in Rome and set in my head in Rome and written almost entirely on return visits to Rome. LAHIRI: (Laughter) Yes, I did very much so. Am I also correct in thinking you might have had Rome, Italy in mind? KELLY: So I believe I'm correct in saying you never come out and tell us where the novel is set. The novel is titled 'Whereabouts,' and Jhumpa Lahiri is with us now.

And just to make things a little more challenging, Lahiri wrote it in Italian first, then translated it into English.

And yet, improbably, there is a delicious sense of place.

The book is short, stripped of the usual details and specifics that authors use to build a plot and characters. We never learn the main character's name. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012.Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri's new novel is all about small, intimate moments playing out in public places. Her second collection, Unaccustomed Earth, was a #1 New York Times bestseller named a best book of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among others and the recipient of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her first novel, The Namesake, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. It was translated into twenty-nine languages. Her debut, internationally-bestselling collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, The New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London and raised in Rhode Island.

Latest book by jhumpa lahiri