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The Namesake tells the story of a newly married couple, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, who emigrate to the United States from India. Not long after they arrive, their first child, a son, is born and there is an immediate clash of cultures. In the Bengali tradition, the ritual of naming a baby can take up to forty-one days after birth. But in America, bureaucracy demands that the baby not be released from hospital without a name on his birth certificate. Luckily, Indian tradition allows for a pet or nickname to be chosen and, oddly, the parents choose the name Gogol after the Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol.The result of a name that connects Lahiri's Gogol to neither his American birth nor his Indian heritage is the beginning of a search for personal identity. This novel has been made into a wonderful film with the same name from director, Mira Nair.The guide to Lahiri s novel includes information on the following:Why is the namesake of an American-born child with Bengali roots a famous, but disturbed, Russian author?How do our names impact on who we are and who we become?What is the impact of immigration on both parents and children? How do Lahiri's skills as a short-story writer influence her presentation of the story? Every Bookclub-in-a-Box discussion guide includes complete coverage of the themes and symbols, writing style and interesting background information on the novel and the author. ... Read more

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Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Rohinton Mistry, R. K. Narayan, Arundhati Roy, Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Seth, Jhumpa Lahiri, Indra Sinha, Chetan Bhagat, Raja Rao, Aravind Adiga, Ruskin Bond, Yogesh Chabria, Siddharth Sanghvi, Mulk Raj Anand, Upamanyu Chatterjee, A. K. Ramanujan, Amit Chaudhuri, J. Bhagyalakshmi, Vikram Chandra, David Davidar, Urvashi Butalia, Aruni Kashyap, Kamala Markandaya, Mridula Koshy, Amit Varma, Manohar Malgonkar, Shashi Deshpande, Mitra Phukan, Malathi Rao, Anita Rau Badami, Sirasri, Anita Nair, Dhruba Hazarika, Anjum Hasan, Mamang Dai, Siddhartha Sarma, Kalpana Swaminathan,. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: R. K. Narayan (October 10, 1906 - May 13, 2001), shortened from Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami (Tamil: ) was an Indian author whose works of fiction include a series of books about people and their interactions in an imagined town in India. He is one of three leading figures of early Indian literature in English, along with Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao. He is credited with bringing Indian literature in English to the rest of the world, and is regarded as one of India's greatest English language novelists. Narayan broke through with the help of his mentor and friend, Graham Greene, who was instrumental in getting publishers for Narayan's first four books, including the semi-autobiographical trilogy of Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher. Narayan's works also include The Financial Expert, hailed as one of the most original works of 1951, and Sahitya Akademi Award winner The Guide, which was adapted for films in Hindi and English languages, and for Broadway. The setting for most of Narayan's stories is the fictional town of Malgudi, first introduced in Swami and Friends. His narratives highlight social context and prov...http://booksllc.net/?l=en ... Read more

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Word count: 1902. ... Read more

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This edition for sale on the Indian Subcontinent ONLY!!! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Interpreting Maladies.
An Interpreter of Maladies is not, as Mrs. Das thinks (and as the reader of Jhumpa Lahiri's stories may initially be thinking, too), a medical doctor or a psychologist; someone who interprets the origin and meaning of his patients' various illnesses and malaises and then prescribes the adequate treatment. No: an Interpreter of Maladies is someone who helps them communicate, who speaks the patients' language and is therefore able to translate their personal representation of their feelings to the listener who then, in turn, must come up with his own interpretation of those representations.

And like Mr. Kapasi, the improbable hero of this collection's title story, Ms. Lahiri merely gives an account of her characters' feelings and situation in life at one particular moment - she rarely judges them, nor does she strive to tell the entire story of their lives; even where, as in "The Third and Final Continent," the narrative covers several decades, it is truly only one brief but crucial period which is important. No sledgehammer is being wielded; Lahiri's tone is subtle, subdued - like any good interpreter, she talks in a low voice, just loud enough for her listener/reader to understand; and you have to want to listen to her. If you expect her to shout, to force her account on you in bullet points and bold strikes, you will miss the many finer nuances in between.

Jhumpa Lahiris heroes are Asian and American, they live in India, Pakistan, London and the U.S., and they eat (and painstakingly slowly prepare) delicious, spicy and flavorful food. Many of the stories deal with emotions and life situations which, although they happen to be experienced by Indians and Asian Americans here, are truly universal - the slow and unspoken death of a marriage ("A Temporary Matter"), prejudice against the unknown, particularly when it comes in the form of an illness ("The Treatment of Bibi Haldar"), the frustrations of a life of unfulfilled promises ("Interpreter of Maladies"), and the multilateral deceptions of marital infidelity ("Sexy"), blunted by the trappings of middle class materialism (again, the title story).

Most of Lahiri's Asian American protagonists belong to the "intellectual" upper middle class suburbian population of Boston and other East Coast cities. While on the one hand this is a plus, because that is the author's own background, too, and therefore a segment of society she can describe from personal experience - which also allows her to make these characters particularly accessible - it on the other hand provides for the story collection's one deficiency; in that it renders her portrayal of Asian Americans (whether recent immigrants or second- and third-generation U.S. citizens) unnecessarily unilateral, to the point of bordering on stereotype - more precisely, the Indian version of the stereotypes generally associated with this part of society. Nevertheless, most of Jhumpa Lahiri's often unlikely heroes are portrayed in great depth, and many of them with a lot of sympathy for their humanness and shortcomings. In the best sense of her adopted role as an interpreter of her protagonists' maladies, it is this delicate understanding and empathy which ultimately carries the tone in Lahiri's writing and which makes her reader want to listen, and to come up with his or her own interpretation of each of these stories.

Of Marriageable Age
The God of Small Things ... Read more

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Chapters: H. P. Lovecraft, Jhumpa Lahiri, Don Mcgregor, Galway Kinnell, Rosmarie Waldrop, Sarah Helen Whitman, David Macaulay, Paula Vogel, Ted Berrigan, Forrest Gander, John Edgar Wideman, Robert Coover, Ruth Whitman, Walter Mossberg, Carolyn D. Wright, John Hawkes, Paul Di Filippo, Benjamin C. Truman, Catherine Imbriglio, John Adams, Jonathan Fast, Jennifer Militello, Leonard Bacon, Albert Gorton Greene, Wilfred Harold Munro, Don Reo, Paul Allen. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 130. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 March 15, 1937) was an American author of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction. Lovecraft's guiding literary principle was what he termed "cosmicism" or "cosmic horror", the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. As early as the 1940s, Lovecraft had developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fiction featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Christian humanism. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality and the abyss. Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades, and he is now regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century. According to Joyce Carol Oates, Lovecraft as with Edgar Allan Poe in the 19th century has exerted...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=13509 ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by University of Oklahoma on January 1, 2009. The length of the article is 584 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Jhumpa Lahiri. Unaccustomed Earth.(Book review)
Author: Catherine Rendon
Publication: World Literature Today (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 2009
Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Volume: 83Issue: 1Page: 68(1)

Article Type: Book review

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This digital document is an article from MELUS, published by The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States on September 22, 2004. The length of the article is 5590 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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Title: Reading Jhumpa Lahiri's interpreter of Maladies as a short story cycle.(II. Reading, Re-Reading, Recovery)(Critical Essay)
Author: Noelle Brada-Williams
Publication: MELUS (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 2004
Publisher: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States
Volume: 29Issue: 3-4Page: 451(14)

Article Type: Critical Essay

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Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Dale Chihuly, Dan Dailey, Jhumpa Lahiri, David Macaulay, Mihai Nadin, Chris Van Allsburg, Thomas Bosworth, Karim Rashid, Friedrich St. Florian, Manfredi Nicoletti, Harry Callahan, Jun Kaneko, Tage Frid, Barry Moser, Richard Merkin, Kris Holmes, Michael Rock, Ootje Oxenaar. Excerpt:Barry Moser (born 1940) is a renowned artist, most famous as a printmaker and illustrator of numerous works of literature. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee , in 1940, Moser studied at the Baylor School , Auburn University , and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga , and did graduate work at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst . He studied with Leonard Baskin . Some of his most celebrated work has been his illustrations for Lewis Carroll 's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass , each of which consisted of more than a hundred prints, and the former of which won him American Book Award for design and illustration in 1982. He has illustrated nearly 200 other works as well, including The Bible (ISBN 0520043545) and Moby-Dick (ISBN 0142005029) . He has been on the faculty of the Department of Illustration Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently Professor in Residence and Printer to the College at Smith College . His works have been displayed in such places as the British Museum , the Metropolitan Museum , Harvard , and the Library of Congress . In 2007 the Smithsonian Art Collectors Program commissioned Moser to create a print for their Small Treasures series, the sales of which benefit educational and cultural programs through the Smithsonian Associates. The resulting relief engraving, An Old Chestnut is on display in the S. Dillon Ripley Center in the National Mall . References (URLs online) Websites (URLs online) A hyperlinked version of this ch... ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by University of Oklahoma on September 1, 2004. The length of the article is 835 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Jhumpa Lahiri. The Namesake.(Book Review)
Author: Ramlal Agarwal
Publication: World Literature Today (Refereed)
Date: September 1, 2004
Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Volume: 78Issue: 3-4Page: 94(1)

Article Type: Book Review

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From the internationally bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a superbly crafted new work of fiction: eight stories that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand. In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth of her garden, where he and his grandson form a special bond. But he's harboring a secret from his daughter, a love affair he's keeping all to himself. In "A Choice of Accommodations," a husband's attempt to turn an old friend's wedding into a romantic getaway weekend with his wife takes a dark, revealing turn as the party lasts deep into the night. In "Only Goodness," a sister eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish, and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in "Hema and Kaushik," a trio of linked stories-a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love, and fate-we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome. ... Read more

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Rare literary and political memorabilia set. Collection of pieces by some of America's greatest living writers. Now considered a contemporary classic. Limited Edition of 200 signed copies. Published in conjunction with the most prestigious fundraising event for the Democratic Party's grassroots organization, Downtown for Democracy. An austerely elegant production by an unidentified group of artists, graphic designers, and printers: 10 x 12 inch loose broadsheets. Each broadsheet is printed on either pristine white or rich cream uncoated stock paper using the LetterPress Process to the very highest standards. Contributions by various writers. Introduction, "Where's My Democracy?", by Jonathan Safran Foer. Handsome black hard board box with yellow titles embossed on cover. Published on the occasion of the Inaugural Public Reading held at the Cooper Union's Great Hall in New York on March 25, 2004. Presents ten stupendous pieces read by their authors and prefaced by Jonathan Safran Foer. The event has a retrospective poignance because it was Susan Sontag's very last public appearance (and Wendy Wasserstein has also since passed away). Many people became demoralized by the victory of a Republican Party that Abraham Lincoln would not have recognized. Sontag, dying but inextinguishable, clung to hope to the very end, asserting that the country has a substantial near-majority that should keep on fighting and resisting. She died on December 28, 2004, an irreplaceable loss to contemporary life and literature. She and Foer were absolutely right: The fight goes on, the fight has just begun, and it will be waged (and won) with small statements that make a big difference. The spectacular Democratic comeback in 2006 makes this rare and radiant moment during a six-year Reign of Darkness sweet vindication indeed. A "must-have" title for collectors of contemporary literature. Eleven of the finest American writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. © 2007 ModernRare.com ... Read more