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Roman Stories

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORKER, NPR • The first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and master of the form since her number one New York Times best seller Unaccustomed Earth • Rome—metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical—is the protagonist, not the setting, of these nine stories
"A delectable, sun-washed treat . . . the stories have the beating heart of the city itself, a place of magnificent decay and vibrant, varied life." —Vogue

In “The Boundary,” one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker’s daughter, who nurses a wound from her family’s immigrant past. In “P’s Parties,” a Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with foreigners at their friend’s yearly birthday gathering—until the husband crosses a line.
And in “The Steps,” on a public staircase that connects two neighborhoods and the residents who climb up and down it, we see Italy’s capital in all of its social and cultural variegations, filled with the tensions of a changing city: visibility and invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home.
These are splendid, searching stories, written in Jhumpa Lahiri’s adopted language of Italian and seamlessly translated by the author and by Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz. Stories steeped in the moods of Italian master Alberto Moravia and guided, in the concluding tale, by the ineluctable ghost of Dante Alighieri, whose words lead the protagonist toward a new way of life.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from August 14, 2023
      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.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Five talented narrators join forces to deliver nuanced performances of Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of short stories. Written in Italian, the author's third language, and translated by her into English, the contemplative and elegant stories revolve around outsiders who are drawn to the City of Light. The mix of voices--Indian subcontinent, mid-American, British-African, Italian-American--highlights the theme of displacement. While individually different, each narrator celebrates Lahiri's precise prose while exploring her characters' otherness and their longing for a possibly imaginary Rome. Michael Obiora voices "Well-Lit House" and "The Procession"; Deepti Gupta voices "The Reentry" and "Notes"; Cassandra Campbell voices "Dante Alighieri"; Carlotta Brentan voices "The Boundary"; and Ari Fliakos voices "P's Parties." Gupta and Fliakos narrate "The Delivery." All five narrators perform "The Steps." A.C.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

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