Interpreter of Maladies

Most of these nine stories take place among Bengali immigrants on the American East Coast, a few in Calcutta. A couple in Boston, still reeling from a loss, trade confessions while their apartment goes dark each evening. A young man newly arrived from India lodges with a very old landlady while he waits for the wife his family chose for him. A boy watches the professor's wife who minds him each afternoon cling to letters from home and to fresh fish that remind her of Calcutta. Newlyweds in an arranged match clash over the Christian trinkets left in their house, and in a Calcutta tenement the residents put up with an aging stair-sweeper's tales of the comfort she has lost.

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About the book

Form

Short stories

Genres

Migration, Family (assigned by AI)

Set in

United States, India

First published

1999 by Houghton Mifflin

Author's age

32 when first published

ISBN

9780395927205 (Mariner Books, United States)

9780006551799 (Flamingo, United Kingdom)

9780358213260 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, United States)

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Wikidata