Wednesday, January 8th at 1:30 pm. We’ll read and discuss three of the stories from Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut collection entitled Interpreter of Maladies (1999): the title story, Interpreter of Maladies “Mrs. Sen’s” and The Third and Final Continent. Jhumpa Lahiri (1967) is a major contemporary American writer. The daughter of immigrants from the Indian state of West Bengal, she has written that she has always felt “intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new.” Her stories and novels are often drawn from her own life experiences, and explore the challenges immigrants from India to the U.S. deal with as they adapt to a very different culture. Interpreter of Maladies won the O. Henry Award for short stories in 1999 and the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway award in 2000.