These eight stories by beloved and bestselling author Jhumpa Lahiri take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life. Here they enter the worlds of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers. Rich with the signature gifts that have established Jhumpa Lahiri as one of our most essential writers, Unaccustomed Earth exquisitely renders the most intricate workings of the heart and mind.
International Bestseller • Winner of the Pulitzer Prize • PEN/Hemingway Award Winner
With a New Foreword by Domenico Starnone
This stunning debut collection charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. In stories that travel from India to America and back again, Lahiri speaks with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner.
1996 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.
The elegant short fictions gathered hereabout the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams. In "Ship Fever," the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history’s most tragic epidemics. In "The English Pupil," Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach.
Each story in this jubilantly acclaimed collection pays testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances.
A family living in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya scurries to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday. A Rwandan girl relates her family’s struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy amid unspeakable acts. A young brother and sister cope with their uncle’s attempt to sell them into slavery. Aboard a bus filled with refugees-a microcosm of today’s Africa-a Muslim boy summons his faith to bear a treacherous ride across Nigeria.
Here are Susan Ketchin’s discerning interviews with twelve southerners living and writing in the South, and along with a piece of fiction by each are her penetrating commentaries about the impact of southern religious experience on their work.
A little more than a generation ago Flannery O’Connor made a startling observation about herself and her fellow southerners: “By and large,” she said, “people in the South still conceive of humanity in theological terms. While the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner who isn’t convinced of it is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.”
This eagerly anticipated second volume of short stories is offered by nationally acclaimed writer Mary Ward Brown, often referred to as the “first lady” of Alabama letters.
With the 11 stories in this long-awaited collectiong, Mary Ward Brown once again offers her devoted fans a palette of new literary pleasures. The hallmarks of her style, so finely wrought in the award-winning Tongues of Flame (1986)–the fully realized characters, her deep sensitivity, a defining sense of place and time–are back in all their richness to involve and enchant the reader.
All but one of the stories are set in Alabama.
