Pranab Chakraborty was a fellow Bengali from Calcutta who had washed up on the shores of Central Square. Soon he was one of the family. From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, a staggeringly beautiful and precise story about a Bengali family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the impossibilities of love, and the unanticipated pleasures and complications of life in America.
“Hell-Heaven” is Jhumpa Lahiri’s ode to the intimate secrets of closest kin, from the acclaimed collection Unaccustomed Earth.
An eBook short.
Praise for Jhumpa Lahiri and Unaccustomed Earth
“Stunning. . . . Gorgeous. . . . Never before has Lahiri mined so perfectly the secrets of the human heart.” —USA Today
“Lucid and revelatory. . . . Both universal and deeply felt.” —The Washington Post Book World
“Graceful and devastating. . . . A gorgeous, meticulous and inviting work . . . of an artist wise in enigmas and human mystery.” —The Miami Herald
JHUMPA LAHIRI, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies and is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani. She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent book in English, Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
Pranab Chakraborty was a fellow Bengali from Calcutta who had washed up on the shores of Central Square. Soon he was one of the family. From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, a staggeringly beautiful and precise story about a Bengali family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the impossibilities of love, and the unanticipated pleasures and complications of life in America.
“Hell-Heaven” is Jhumpa Lahiri’s ode to the intimate secrets of closest kin, from the acclaimed collection Unaccustomed Earth.
An eBook short.
Reviews
Praise for Jhumpa Lahiri and Unaccustomed Earth
“Stunning. . . . Gorgeous. . . . Never before has Lahiri mined so perfectly the secrets of the human heart.” —USA Today
“Lucid and revelatory. . . . Both universal and deeply felt.” —The Washington Post Book World
“Graceful and devastating. . . . A gorgeous, meticulous and inviting work . . . of an artist wise in enigmas and human mystery.” —The Miami Herald
JHUMPA LAHIRI, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies and is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani. She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent book in English, Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
