Jhumpa Lahiri

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The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

Discover the Penguin books that shaped us

A fantastically rich - and beautiful - anthology that's teaching me a lot

A feast . . . her choice of 40 authors embraces familiar greats and sows them with fascinating additions . . . they remind us of the short story's playfulness, it's ability to move us with unexpected sharpness while it experiments with voices, styles and boundaries

Jhumpa Lahiri has pulled off something quite striking here: a literary anthology that sparkles with invention and variety, makes a remarkably convincing case for the vitality of the modern Italian short story and also beguiles, thanks to her sharp-eyed work as editor, compiler and part-translator.

Taken one by one, each story in this volume is a jewel. Taken all together, the book is a remarkable introduction to Italian literature and a great gift to the English-speaking reader. Remarkable stories from a wide range of writers describe the mundane and the fantastic, the everyday and the sublime.

An enticing collection . . . a remarkable sample of the literary form . . . the tales are by turns startling, moving, intriguing and provocative; they bring melancholy, humour and a dose of the uncanny.

'Rich. . . eclectic. . . a feast' Telegraph 
 
Jhumpa Lahiri's landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, including well known authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante and Luigi Pirandello, alongside many captivating rediscoveries. 
 
Poets, journalists, visual artists, musicians, editors, critics, teachers, scientists, politicians, translators: the writers that inhabit these pages represent a dynamic cross section of Italian society. 
 
'An enticing collection . . . the tales are by turns startling, moving, intriguing and provocative' The Times Literary Supplement

Jhumpa Lahiri is an award-winning author and translator. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection and was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2015. Her other works of fiction in English include The Lowland, which was a finalist for the Man Booker prize. 
 
Lahiri has also written three books directly in Italian, including In altre parole (translated in English as In Other Words) and the novel Dove mi trovo. Her translation of Domenico Starnone's Trick was a Finalist for the National Book Award. She divides her time between Rome and Princeton University, where she is a professor of Creative Writing and Literary Translation

The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

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A fantastically rich - and beautiful - anthology that's teaching me a lot

The best anthology of its kind I've read

A feast . . . her choice of 40 authors embraces familiar greats and sows them with fascinating additions . . . they remind us of the short story's playfulness, it's ability to move us with unexpected sharpness while it experiments with voices, styles and boundaries

Jhumpa Lahiri has pulled off something quite striking here: a literary anthology that sparkles with invention and variety, makes a remarkably convincing case for the vitality of the modern Italian short story and also beguiles, thanks to her sharp-eyed work as editor, compiler and part-translator.

An enticing collection . . . a remarkable sample of the literary form . . . the tales are by turns startling, moving, intriguing and provocative; they bring melancholy, humour and a dose of the uncanny.

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