Events

On Yearning and Exile: Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies

6:30pm, Wednesday 26 June

These aren't your regular short stories. They're Pulitzer-winning, scintillating studies in yearning and exile from a Bengali-Boston writer. Her prose are beautifully measured, subtle and sober, and she leaves a lot unsaid, but this work is rich in observational detail and full of emotional pull and reverberation.

The stories: a couple exchange unprecedented confessions during nightly blackouts in their Boston apartment as they struggle to cope with a heartbreaking loss; a student arrives in new lodgings in a mystifying new land and, while he awaits the arrival of his arranged-marriage wife from Bengal, he finds his first bearings with the aid of the curious evening rituals that his centenarian landlady orchestrates; a schoolboy looks on while his childminder finds that the smallest dislocation can unbalance her new American life all too easily and send her spiralling into nostalgia for her homeland…

Read along with us. And bring your thoughts on Wednesday 26 June, from 6:30pm. We promise to reward you with lots of wine and home-baked goods.