Interpreter of Maladies

Interpreter of Maladies is Jhumpa Lahiri's first collection of short stories, published in 1999. The nine stories in it were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000, and also took that year's Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

Most of the people in these stories are Indians or Indian Americans, and most of them live between the country their families came from and the country they now call home. The opening story, A Temporary Matter, keeps to one house: Shukumar and Shoba, a married couple who have become strangers to each other, begin talking again during a run of nightly power cuts, and the confessions that follow reach further than either of them expects.

In When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, a botany professor from Dhaka spends a year in New England on a research grant with his wife and seven daughters left behind, and he comes to dinner with a ten-year-old girl's family while news of the war in East Pakistan fills the television. Lahiri's book was chosen as the best debut of the year by The New Yorker and appeared on Oprah Winfrey's top ten book list.