Roman Stories

Description

In 'The Boundary', one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker's daughter, who nurses a wound from her family's immigrant past. In 'P's Parties', a Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with foreigners at their friend's yearly birthday gathering-until the husband crosses a line.And in 'The Steps', on a public staircase that connects two neighbourhoods and the residents who climb up and down it, we see Italy's capital in all of its social and cultural variegations, filled with the tensions of a changing city: visibility and invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home.These are splendid, searching stories, written in Jhumpa Lahiri's adopted language of Italian and seamlessly translated by the author and by Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz.ABOUT THE AUTHORJhumpa Lahiri was born in London and raised in Rhode Island. Her debut, internationally-bestselling collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, The New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.