From the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies comes a marvelous new novel-her first in nearly a decade. Please join us for a discussion and reading.

Tickets are $28. The price covers a signed copy of Whereabouts, shipped to locations in the Continental U.S., and a portion of the profit is donated to the Princeton Public Library.

Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant: the sidewalks around her house, parks, bridges, piazzas, streets, stores, coffee bars. We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother, mired in a desperate solitude after the narrators father’s untimely death. In addition to colleagues at work, where she never quite feels at ease, woman we follow has girl friends, guy friends, and him, a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. But in the arc of a year, as one season gives way to the next, transformation awaits. One day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the suns vital heat, her perspective will change.

This is the first novel Lahiri has both written in Italian and translated into English

Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland; and a work of nonfiction, In Other Words. She has received numerous awards and honors, including the Pulitzer Prize and the 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama. Lahiri is Director of Creative Writing at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, where she is also Professor. Alessandro Giammei is a scholar and translator. He is Assistant Professor of Italian at Bryn Mawr College and the author of Nell’officina del nonsense di Toti Scialoja.

This event is cosponsored by The Princeton Public Library, and Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, Department of French & Italian and the Program in Translation & Intercultural Communication.