Teach Yourself Italian
Jhumpa Lahiri on language, transformation, and learning to write in Italian.
Brotherly Love
[Fiction] Two brothers begin to drift apart in India during the late ’60s after one decides to study in the U.S. and the other becomes a Naxalite:
“Richard asked Subhash about India, about its caste system, its poverty. Who was to blame?
“I don’t know. These days everyone just blames everyone else.
“But is there a solution? Where does the government stand?
“Subhash didn’t know how to describe India’s fractious politics, its complicated society, to an American. He said it was an ancient place that was also young, still struggling to know itself. You should be talking to my brother, he said.”
Trading Stories: Notes from a Literary Apprenticeship
For much of my life, I wanted to be other people; here was the central dilemma, the reason, I believe, for my creative stasis. I was always falling short of people’s expectations: my immigrant parents’, my Indian relatives’, my American peers’, above all my own. The writer in me wanted to edit myself. If only there was a little more this, a little less that, depending on the circumstances: then the asterisk that accompanied me would be removed. My upbringing, an amalgam of two hemispheres, was heterodox and complicated; I wanted it to be conventional and contained.