Jhumpa Lahiri Knihy

Právě za svůj debut získala roku 2000 tehdy třiatřicetiletá americká autorka indického původu Pulitzerovu cenu. Spisovatelka s výjimečným citem pro jemná hnutí mysli tlumočí soužení svých krajanů, kteří se v Americe potýkají s odlišným životním stylem a hledají rovnováhu mezi svýmitradicemi a lákavými americkými novotami. Indové narození v Americe zjišťují, že "tlumočníky" často potřebují nejen ve vztazích s Američany, ale i s indickými partnery nebo příbuznými. Každý, kdo se kdy cítil cizincem, ať už zeměpisně či citově, najde v této pozoruhodné knize povídek svůj příběh.

Povídky se zabývají přesazením do nové země (USA), která je pro přistěhovalce nejen první generace stále půdou nezvyklou. Povídky jsou kulturní meditací či reflexí na život mezi dvěma kulturami, kdy jsou lidé nuceni spolu vycházet a utvářet si životní prostor. Hrdinové v nové zemi zažívají osudové zvraty a po svém se vyrovnávají s životem mezi Východem a Západem, někteří najdou svoji lásku, jiní nikoliv, některým se splní americký sen, jiní propadnou alkoholu či odevzdané pasivitě. Titul vyhlásily New York Times i Publishers Weekly knihou roku 2008.

Impresionistické mikropovídky, kde není ani jedno slovo navíc, kde je všednost života povýšena na něco mimořádného a neobyčejného. Melancholická meditace, nikoliv však depresivní, nad samotou a osamělostí anonymní vypravěčky v nejmenovaném evropském městě. Psaní Lahiriové je i tentokrát chirurgicky přesné, elegantní, působí uklidňujícím dojmem, ačkoliv pod povrchem se skrývá hluboký neklid. Úspornou reflexivní prózou se znovu prolínají úvahy, v nichž se autorka zamýšlí nad svou vykořeněností. „Existuje nějaké místo, jímž jenom neprojíždíme? Zmatená, ztracená, rozhozená, ulítlá, vykořeněná, vykolejená, vyjevená, nesvá, rozrušená, švorc: v téhle rodině pojmů je mi dobře. Vida, domov, slova, která mě přivádějí na svět.“

Jhumpa Lahiri's landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, including well known authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante and Luigi Pirandello, alongside many captivating rediscoveries. Poets, journalists, visual artists, musicians, editors, critics, teachers, scientists, politicians, translators: the writers that inhabit these pages represent a dynamic cross section of Italian society.

In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her first book an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail—the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase—that opens whole worlds of emotion. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity.

Epic in its canvas and intimate in its portrayal of lives undone and forged anew, 'The Lowland' is a deeply felt novel of family ties that entangle and fray in ways unforeseen and unrevealed, of ties that ineluctably define who we are. With all the hallmarks of Jhumpa Lahiri's achingly poignant, exquisitely empathetic story-telling, this is her most devastating work of fiction to date.

Luminous essays on translation and self-translation by an award-winning writer and literary translatorTranslating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages.With subtlety and emotional immediacy, Lahiri draws on Ovid’s myth of Echo and Narcissus to explore the distinction between writing and translating, and provides a close reading of passages from Aristotle’s Poetics to talk more broadly about writing, desire, and freedom. She traces the theme of translation in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and takes up the question of Italo Calvino’s popularity as a translated author. Lahiri considers the unique challenge of translating her own work from Italian to English, the question “Why Italian?,” and the singular pleasures of translating contemporary and ancient writers.Featuring essays originally written in Italian and published in English for the first time, as well as essays written in English, Translating Myself and Others brings together Lahiri’s most lyrical and eloquently observed meditations on the translator’s art as a sublime act of both linguistic and personal metamorphosis.

_______________ 'A passionate love letter to language and to Italy ... a bold and quirkily engaging self-portrait' - Lee Langley, Spectator 'A writer of uncommon elegance and poise' - New York Times 'A fascinating account of her linguistic exile' - Erica Wagner, Harper's Bazaar _______________ In Other Words is a revelation. It is at heart a love story of a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on obsession: that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip to Florence after college. Although Lahiri studied Italian for many years afterwards, true mastery had always eluded her. Seeking full immersion, she decided to move to Rome with her family, for 'a trial by fire, a sort of baptism' into a new language and world. There, she began to read and to write - initially in her journal - solely in Italian. In Other Words, an autobiographical work written in Italian, investigates the process of learning to express oneself in another language, and describes the journey of a writer seeking a new voice. Presented in a dual-language format, this is a wholly original book about exile, linguistic and otherwise, written with an intensity and clarity not seen since Vladimir Nabokov: a startling act of self-reflection and a provocative exploration of belonging and reinvention.

How do you clothe a book? In this deeply personal reflection, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri explores the art of the book jacket from the perspectives of both reader and writer. Probing the complex relationships between text and image, author and designer, and art and commerce, Lahiri delves into the role of the uniform; explains what book jackets and design have come to mean to her; and how, sometimes, "the covers become a part of me."

The Cahiers Series is delighted to publish a newly commissioned work by renowned bilingual Jhumpa Lahiri who for three years has been collaborating with her friend the classicist Yelena Baraz on a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses into English. From among the elements of transformation that have spoken to her directly and intimately she has chosen to focus here on stones: stones that turn into human beings; and, later, human beings - silenced, stilled, petrified - who will turn into stone. The connotations of stone - of rock, of pebble - pose questions of origin and destiny, immobility and unsettledness, living and dying. Lahiri's text on translation-as-metamorphosis and the protean self resonates alongside the dynamic and colourful paintings of celebrated artist Jamie Nares. These extend the exploration of metamorphosis by questioning, beautifully, the relation of the permanent to the ephemeral, the necessary to the aleatory, the completed art work to the human gesture that created it.