Roman Stories
Short stories of belonging and displacement in Rome
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A collection of short stories set in and around Rome from Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies.
'Stimulating, elegant, distinctive and thought-provoking' – The Sunday Times
In these short stories Jhumpa Lahiri sets her gaze on the eternally beautiful city of Rome, illuminating the frailties of the human condition and dissecting lives lived on the margins.
A man recalls a summer party that awakens an alternative version of himself. A couple haunted by a tragic loss return to seek consolation. An outsider family is pushed out of the block in which they hoped to settle. A set of steps in a Roman neighbourhood connects the daily lives of the city’s myriad inhabitants.
This is an evocative fresco of Rome, the most alluring character of all: contradictory, in constant transformation and a home to those who know they can’t fully belong but choose it anyway.
Rich with Lahiri’s signature gifts, Roman Stories is a masterful work from one of the finest writers of our time.
Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lahiri (Whereabouts) delivers a dazzling collection of nine stories originally written in Italian and featuring characters who grapple with vast emotional and social chasms that cleave the lives of families, longtime friends, and immigrants. In "The Reentry," two friends, an Italian woman in mourning for her father and a visiting professor, meet at a trattoria where the woman downplays the racially tinged slights her dark-skinned friend endures from the owners, forever altering the friendship. "The Steps" paints a tableau of contemporary Rome centered on a staircase that functions as the beating heart of a neighborhood—a mother ascends the stairway on her way to a job minding someone else's children while thinking about the 13-year-old son she left in another country; later, a teenage child of immigrants imagines for an instant she is one of the girls in miniskirts who congregate on the steps to smoke cigarettes. Throughout, Lahiri's luminous prose captures a side of Rome often ignored: "Empty plastic cups on their sides sway from right to left like the bright beam of a lighthouse that flashes methodically over black water." These unembroidered yet potent stories shine.
