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Powell's Q&A, Q&A | December 13, 2009

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Describe your latest project. Norton has just published The Autobiography of Fidel Castro, a novel that took seven years of my life to complete as I... Continue »
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6 Burnside Literature- A to Z
2 Hawthorne Literature- A to Z

Other titles in the Vintage Contemporaries series:

  1. A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories
  2. A Brief History of the Flood
  3. A Closed Eye
  4. A Cure for Dreams
  5. A Far Country
  6. A Handbook to Luck
  7. A Lesson Before Dying
  8. A Movie...and a Book
  9. A Piece of My Heart
  10. A Special Providence
  11. A Stranger in This World: Stories
  12. A Thing (or Two) about Curtis and Camilla
  13. Abandon
  14. All I Could Get
  15. American Psycho
  16. Anagrams
  17. Angel Rock
  18. Another Green World
  19. Asa, as I Knew Him
  20. Ash Wednesday
  21. Atlas of Unknowns
  22. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse
  23. Babylon and Other Stories
  24. Babylon Rolling
  25. Back in the World: Stories
  26. Bad Behavior (88 Edition)
  27. Bailey's Cafe
  28. Bicycle Days
  29. Big Bad Love: Stories
  30. Birds of America: Stories
  31. Black Tickets ((Rev)79 Edition)
  32. Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had to
  33. Breaking and entering
  34. Bridge of Sighs
  35. Brief Lives
  36. Bright Lights, Big City
  37. Brightness Falls
  38. Brother, I'm Dying
  39. Buffalo Soldiers
  40. Burning House
  41. Cathedral
  42. Catherine Carmier
  43. Chasing Windmills
  44. Checkpoint
  45. Chilly Scenes of Winter
  46. Claire Marvel
  47. Company
  48. Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories
  49. Day
  50. Day of the Bees
  51. December
  52. Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera
  53. Delcorso's Gallery
  54. Dirty Work
  55. Distortions
  56. Dogwalker: Stories
  57. Don't Cry
  58. Dr. Haggard's Disease
  59. East of the Mountains
  60. East of the Mountains
  61. Edgewater Angels
  62. Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright: A Novel
  63. Empire Falls (HBO Tie-In)
  64. Enchanted Night
  65. Et Tu, Babe
  66. Evening
  67. Falling in Place (80 Edition)
  68. Father's Day
  69. Fidel's Last Days
  70. Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories
  71. Fireworks
  72. Five Gates of Hell
  73. Fraud
  74. Friend of My Youth
  75. Gallatin Canyon
  76. Ghost
  77. Glamorama
  78. God's Fool
  79. Goodnight, Nebraska
  80. Gorilla, My Love
  81. Great Neck
  82. Happy All the Time
  83. Henry of Atlantic City
  84. Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen
  85. Honeymoon: And Other Stories
  86. House of Sand and Fog
  87. House on Mango Street
  88. How It Ended: New and Collected Stories
  89. How to Breathe Underwater: Stories
  90. In a Country of Mothers
  91. In Lucia's Eyes
  92. In My Father's House
  93. In the Cut
  94. In the Driver's Seat
  95. In the Fall
  96. In Times of Siege
  97. Indelible Acts
  98. Jack
  99. Jamesland
  100. Jernigan
  101. Keep the Change
  102. Kentucky Straight: Stories
  103. King Bongo: A Novel of Havana
  104. Krik? Krak!
  105. La Casa En Mango Street
  106. Lark and Termite
  107. Last of the Menu Girls
  108. Latecomers
  109. Leaving Home
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  111. Like Life: Stories
  112. Like You'd Understand, Anyway
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  114. Love Always
  115. Love Among the Ruins
  116. Love in the Present Tense
  117. Lunar Park
  118. Lust and Other Stories
  119. Lying Awake
  120. Mama Day
  121. Matrimony
  122. Meditations from a Movable Chair: Essays
  123. Meditations in Green
  124. Memoirs of a Geisha
  125. Mile Zero
  126. Monkeys
  127. Mortimer of the Maghreb: Stories
  128. Mozart and Leadbelly (05 Edition)
  129. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
  130. Netherland
  131. New England White
  132. Ninety-Two in the Shade
  133. Nobody's Angel
  134. Nothing But Blue Skies
  135. Nothing Lost
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  138. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
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  140. Our Lady of the Forest
  141. Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories
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  144. Paradise
  145. Park City: New and Selected Stories
  146. Particles and Luck
  147. Peace
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  151. Players
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  154. Project X
  155. Providence
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  157. Ransom
  158. Ratner's Star
  159. Reservation Road
  160. Reservation Road
  161. Revolutionary Road (Movie Tie-In Edition)
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  165. Samedi the Deafness
  166. SAP Rising
  167. Scooter
  168. Secrets and Surprises
  169. Selected Stories
  170. Self-Help
  171. Short Cuts: Selected Stories
  172. Short People
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  203. The Dive from Clausen's Pier
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Unaccustomed Earth (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Unaccustomed Earth (Vintage Contemporaries) Cover

Staff Pick

Unaccustomed Earth is in many ways a deeply and authentically sad book. I would not advise reading the stories too quickly; they will each haunt you for days afterward (and, unusually in a collection like this, they are all equally strong). But Lahiri's prose is worth it; her work is masterful, confident, and timeless, and this gorgeously written collection of stories is her strongest fiction yet.
Recommended by Jill Owens, Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Knopf Canada is proud to welcome this bestselling, Pulitzer Prize--winning author with eight dazzling stories that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life.

In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father who carefully tends her garden-where she later unearths evidence of a love affair he is keeping to himself. In A Choice of Accommodations, a couple's romantic getaway weekend takes a dark turn at a party that lasts deep into the night. In Only Goodness, a woman 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 fateful 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.

Unaccustomed Earth is rich with the author's signature gifts: exquisite prose, emotional wisdom and subtle renderings of the most intricate workings of the heart and mind. It is the work of a writer at the peak of her powers.

Synopsis:

In this collection from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, eight dazzling stories take readers from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as each explores the secrets at the heart of family life.

Synopsis:

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.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 2 comments:
mandylea6, October 17, 2009 (view all comments by mandylea6)
Truly beautiful and devastating. Jhumpa Lahiri's writing effects my heart like few authors are able to.
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Chris Horne, April 20, 2009 (view all comments by Chris Horne)
Finishing this collection of carefully wrought and longish short stories was bittersweet. Lahari is a master of character study, and it's difficult to believe she's still a young woman. Her descriptions of her multigenerational, mostly Bengali immigrant, characters felt intimate and usually sympathetic. The details may be Indian, but the emotions are universal. I can't think of any writer today who can so closely render the complicated interactions of adults and their offspring.

Two things are remarkable about these stories. One is the way she moves around from one point of view to another quite easily so that we see a situation from the standpoints of several characters. Lahiri switches smoothly in and out of various perspectives until she has rendered a little gem of a tale.

The second remarkable characteristic is the way she ends a story. It's not the classic O Henry ending where there's a twist that catches you by surprise and may not make sense entirely but what I think of now as a Lahiri ending, a devastating insight that takes your breath away. There's not an unsatisfying conclusion in any of the eight stories that make up this collection.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780307278258
Author:
Lahiri, Jhumpa
Publisher:
Vintage Books USA
Author:
Lahiri, Jhumpa
Subject:
Short Stories (single author)
Subject:
Short stories
Subject:
Bengali Americans
Edition Description:
Paperback
Series:
Vintage Contemporaries
Publication Date:
April 2009
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Pages:
352
Dimensions:
7.92x5.30x.78 in. .56 lbs.

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