![]() ![]() This title is no longer available for programming after the 2018-19 grant year. “My grandfather always says that’s what books are for…to travel without moving an inch.” -from The Namesake Lahiri can be seen in a cameo as “Aunt Jhumpa” in the 2006 film adaptation. The novel “beautifully conveys the émigré’s disorientation, nostalgia, and yearning for tastes, smells, and customs left behind” ( Los Angeles Times Book Review). This is “a story of guilt and liberation it speaks to the universal struggle to extricate ourselves from … family and obligation and the curse of history” ( Boston Globe). In this 2003 bestseller by the Pulitzer-prize-winning author, two generations of a Bengali-American family in Massachusetts struggle between new and old, assimilation and cultural preservation, striving toward the future and longing for the past. Born to Bengali émigré parents and newly arrived in the United States from London, she had to grapple early with questions of identity, and the impact of this is palpable in The Namesake. National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellow Jhumpa Lahiri is known publicly by her nickname because her kindergarten teacher deemed it easier to pronounce than her proper name, Nilanjana Sudeshna. ![]()
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