Rome--metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical--is the protagonist, not the setting, of these nine stories: the first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize–winning master of the form since her number one 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 neighborhoods 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. Stories steeped in the moods of Italian master Alberto Moravia and guided, in the concluding tale, by the ineluctable ghost of Dante Alighieri, whose words lead the protagonist toward a new way of life.

Autorentext
JHUMPA LAHIRI is the author of five works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, The Lowland and Whereabouts; and a work of nonfiction, In Other Words. She has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; the PEN/Hemingway Award; the PEN/Malamud Award; the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award; the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; a 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama; and the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia, for In altre parole.

Klappentext

"Nine mesmerizing stories saturated in the details of Roman life that showcase Jhumpa Lahiri's extraordinary range and virtuosity"--

Zusammenfassung
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Interpreter of Maladies returns with her first short story collection since the publication of her number one New York Times best seller Unaccustomed Earth—a major literary event and a tour de force

Nine mesmerizing stories saturated in the details of Roman life that showcase Jhumpa Lahiri’s extraordinary range and virtuosity.

An immigrant family confronts the devastating aftershocks of racial violence. A young couple discovers the joy of domestic comfort and then spirals into unrelenting misfortune. A group of strangers orbit each other unknowingly as they ascend and descend the ancient steps that anchor their neighborhood. An annual garden party sews the seed of a haunting marital betrayal. In story after story, Lahiri delivers her richest and most stirring work yet in a collection whose themes reverberate with the tensions of modern urban life: dislocation and deracination, visibility and invisibility, the difficulty of straddling worlds and cultures, the meaning of home. Roman Stories is a magnificent testament to Lahiri’s dazzling style and unalloyed mastery of the short form.