Word: lahiri
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...pleasure lies in the piquancy of the writer-state pairings. Some are more obvious--heavy hitter Jonathan Franzen handles New York. Some are less so--imagine the editors' relief when they remembered that Jhumpa Lahiri hails from tiny Rhode Island (which, as she points out, is not an island!). There's something about their home state that puts writers in confessional moods. Picture Anthony Bourdain lighting M-80s ("It's a quarter stick a dynamite!!") as a j.d. in Jersey or a teenage Joshua Ferris cruising the canals of Florida with Jimmy Buffett (at the time he didn't know...
...Writer's Voice Thank you for Lev Grossman's profile of Jhumpa Lahiri [May 26]. Her work provides a striking portrayal of the struggles faced by immigrant families in negotiating and attempting to reconcile their multiple identities while remaining engaged with all aspects of their new home. It reminds me of what my grandfather used to say: "Anyone can play the drum, but it is only an elder who can interpret the meaning of the sounds." Austine Duru, CHICAGO...
...Writer's Voice Thank you for Lev Grossman's profile of Jhumpa Lahiri [May 19]. Her work provides a striking portrayal of the struggles faced by immigrant families in negotiating and attempting to reconcile their multiple identities while remaining engaged with all aspects of their new home. It reminds me of what my grandfather used to say: "Anyone can play the drum, but it is only an elder who can interpret the meaning of the sounds." Austine Duru, Chicago...
...Lahiri's rise is part of a changing of the guard in American fiction, from a generation in which white American-born men still play a primary role (Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon) to one in which the principal voices weren't born here, like Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat (born in Haiti), Gary Shteyngart (Russia) and Junot Díaz (the Dominican Republic). They're transnationals, writers for whom displacement and dual cultural citizenship aren't a temporary political accident but the status...
They are almost as different from one another as they are from their predecessors. Díaz, Lahiri's fellow Pulitzer winner, writes wild, slangy, funny prose laced with Dominican Spanish and Star Trek references. His determination to entertain is almost vaudevillian. Lahiri's stories are grave and quiet and slow, in the 19th century manner. They don't bribe you with humor or plot twists or flashy language; they extract a steep up-front investment of time from the reader before they return their hard, dense nuggets of truth. It's difficult to quote from her stories: they refuse...