Word: lahiri
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Colson Whitehead is, along with Jhumpa Lahiri, almost certainly the most critically adored American novelist under 40. To be really sure about it, you'd need some kind of hypothetical rave-ometer (which, come to think of it, is kind of a Whiteheadian idea), but after two novels--The Intuitionist and John Henry Days--he has been awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant, praised by John Updike and Jonathan Franzen and compared (by this magazine) to Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison. So it's a bit of a surprise to find that his third novel, Apex Hides the Hurt (Doubleday...
...Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake, a novel about Indian immigrants and their U.S.-born son, has observed the struggles of Asian Americans like Chang up close. "Asian kids are not just choosing a different way of doing things," she says. "They're choosing an entirely different [cultural] vocabulary. They're dealing with oil and water." Nowhere is that incompatibility more deeply felt than in romance. Most Asian-immigrant parents encourage their children to find partners of the same ethnicity, and many of the kids see the advantages of doing so. As June Kim, a Korean-American copywriter in Philadelphia...
Long before Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies, long before Monica Ali won thousands of devoted readers with her heartrending Brick Lane, another novelist was offering us exquisitely detailed portraits of bodies in transit--Easterners in the West, half-Westerners back "home" in the East, people who don't know where they belong--and master classes in the art of sly and sensuous fiction. Born to a German mother and a Bengali father in India, long a resident of Britain and the U.S., Anita Desai was a global, migrant writer before such a thing was fashionable...
...Baumgartner's Bombay, an old-style German long settled in India who comes into fatal contact with a younger German of the mobile, backpacking generation. Nowadays, when millions are living in places not fully their own, foreignness is nothing to write home about. The characters in Ali's and Lahiri's fiction might be the daughters, even the granddaughters, of Desai, faced not with a split between cultures but with a curious fusion...
Nair is currently developing an adaptation of The Namesake, the Jhumpa Lahiri best seller about a family's move from Calcutta to Boston, and she will direct Homebody/Kabul, Tony Kushner's play about a woman who goes to Taliban-era Afghanistan seeking her mother...