Jhumpa LAHIRI

JHUMPA LAHIRI

Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection of eight stories, Unaccustomed Earth (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), will be out in April 2008. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award for her début story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin, 1999) in 2000. And her first novel, The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), was adapted as a movie by celebrated Indian filmmaker Mira Nair in 2006.

The title “Unaccustomed Earth” is borrowed from a line in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House,” from the introduction to The Scarlet Letter (1850): “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”