Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Summary

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Zero to Well-Read: "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri

Podcast: Zero to Well-Read (Book Riot)
Episode: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Hosts: Jeff O'Neal & Rebecca Schinsky
Guest: Dr. Laura McGrath
Date: April 28, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Zero to Well-Read features an in-depth, lively, and reverent discussion of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize–winning debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999). Hosts Jeff O’Neal and Rebecca Schinsky are joined by Dr. Laura McGrath, an English professor, literary historian, and data scientist, to unpack why this book is beloved, its publishing history, what makes Lahiri’s short stories distinct, and how the collection fits into the American literary canon.

Interpreter of Maladies is celebrated for its lushly detailed stories about identity, immigration, and the quiet dramas of daily life. The trio explore the book’s remarkable critical and commercial success, the form and function of short story collections, Lahiri’s life and career, select standout stories, and broader literary questions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Interpreter of Maladies?

• The Basics: Nine short stories spanning US and India, mostly about identity, relocation/dislocation, loneliness, longing, and the immigrant experience.
• Significance: A rare debut short story collection that became a literary phenomenon, selling over 15 million copies and winning the Pulitzer Prize (the first-ever for a paperback original) ([04:17], [31:26]).
• Short Story Form: The panel notes that story collections typically don’t sell and receive less love both commercially and critically—making Lahiri’s achievement “a one-of-one” ([03:15], [25:35]).

“Interpreter of Maladies is not only a really singular achievement of late 20th century publishing, but also just a gorgeous, gorgeous book on the page at the sentence level.”
— Laura McGrath ([03:15])

2. Thematic and Structural Overview

• Themes: Diaspora, cross-cultural tension, troubled relationships, everyday drama, family conflict, and the dignifying of the ordinary.
• Dignifying the Ordinary: Lahiri is recognized for finding “beauty in the most mundane household objects and elevating them... through such gorgeous language” ([06:15]).
• Structure: The arrangement of stories is meaningful—beginning and ending stories (“A Temporary Matter” and “The Third and Final Continent”) mirror each other, as do stories set in India ([20:04]).

3. Standout Stories: Highlights & Analyses

"A Temporary Matter" ([07:20]–[12:25])

• Summary: A couple, Shobha and Shukumar, grieve separately after the loss of their stillborn child. A nightly power outage leads them to share painful secrets, culminating in the revelation that Shobha is leaving.
• Form: Praised as a perfect example of the “capital S” Short Story: fully realized world in minimal space, ending with emotional ambiguity.
• Quote:

“What we want from literary fiction is a window into a human experience that you haven’t seen articulated in this way before, and Lahiri does it so concisely...”
— Rebecca ([10:43])

"This Blessed House" ([15:31]–[20:02])

• Summary: Newlyweds discover Christian paraphernalia in their new home, leading to discord and eventual tenderness.
• Insight: Twinkle, the wife, could be a “manic pixie dream girl,” but Lahiri gives her depth and humanity. The story captures how other people’s perspectives can change our view of those we love.

"A Real Durwan" & "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar" ([20:04])

• Focus on themes of marginalization and community integration/exclusion; contrasting fates for women on the fringes of society.
• Discussion on how reading the collection as a whole prompts attention to the structure and connections between stories ([20:04]).

"Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine" ([62:27], [62:41])

• Notable for its emotional impact; highlighted as a story that resonates more on re-read.

"Interpreter of Maladies" (Title Story) ([72:24])

• Meta-Narrative: Title character is a literal interpreter of medical maladies, but the story allegorizes Lahiri’s role as the author—mediating meaning between cultures.
• Insight: Explores the difference between seeing and truly noticing another person; Mrs. Das romanticizes/exoticizes Mr. Kapasi rather than recognizing his personhood.

"Sexy" ([91:42])

• Noted as most-anthologized, perhaps for its structure and accessibility, though not a panel favorite.

4. Why Are Short Story Collections So Rare—and How Did This Succeed? ([22:52]–[37:44])

• Industry Rarity: Only 1.2% of fiction acquired are debut short story collections ([26:40]).
• Publishing Story: Paperback original, almost no publicity, word-of-mouth sales, New Yorker publication for two stories, championed by booksellers ([27:12], [27:49], [28:58]).
• 2000 Pulitzer Win: First-ever for a paperback original and for a debut collection. Signaled the end of an era for high-profile short story wins ([33:03]).

“A short story collection becomes a word of mouth sensation is just a thing that doesn’t happen.”
— Rebecca ([27:43])

• Cultural Analogy: Jeff proposes the book is like “March of the Penguins” winning Best Picture—an impossible phenomenon ([35:11]).

5. Short Stories: Function, Form, and Relevance

Pedagogical Tool and Literary Form ([45:01]–[51:04])

• Short stories are great for teaching literary unity, form, and critical attention.
• Seen as much harder to write well than novels—every word must do more, and the effect sought is singular.
• Dr. McGrath shares how stories in Interpreter are used to teach short fiction’s power and effect.

Poe and the Single Effect ([56:05]–[61:42])

• Critical Tradition: Laura reads Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 review of Hawthorne, emphasizing a short story’s goal to achieve a “single unique effect.”
• Interpreter of Maladies achieves this again and again, creating “gem-like stories” that end in emotional gut-punches or moments of lingering awe.

“Each story tells a story on its own, but the collection of them tells a story together about what the author’s primary concerns are.”
— Rebecca ([61:42])

6. The "Lahiri-ness" and Craft

• Lahiri’s defining compassion for her characters—rarely creating outright villains, always treating people’s failings as fundamentally human ([67:58]).
• Emphasis on characters coming to realizations via circumstance, not epiphany; often seeing themselves or others in a new light reflected by someone else.

7. Publishing and Career of Jhumpa Lahiri ([38:46]–[44:42])

• Born in London to Bengali parents, immigrated to Cambridge, MA at age two; English degree at Barnard, multiple advanced degrees.
• Began writing short stories in 1997; “A Temporary Matter,” her first, was published in The New Yorker and as part of the collection.
• Has since published more lauded fiction (e.g., The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth) and embarked on a remarkable Italian-language writing/translation phase.

8. Why Read this Book—And Who Shouldn't ([88:27])

• If you love short stories or want to understand literary fiction, this is essential.
• Those needing tidy endings and lots of plot might find Lahiri’s dwelling in ambiguity and emotional messiness unsatisfying.
• The book is emotionally heavy, especially around loss and grief.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Short Story Power

• “It's just a whole world in like 15 pages, and you're dropped right into the middle of these characters’ relationship. And... there's no resolution.”
  — Rebecca ([10:43])

• “I think her harshest judgments... are reserved for those people who are fundamentally uncurious.”
  — Laura ([13:15])

On Form and Interpretation

• “There's something like a little extra magic about a really good short story... that a novel can do, but a short story does it better.”
  — Rebecca ([61:42])

• “The short story is the cure to our attention ailments.”
  — Laura ([63:52])

• “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
  — Rebecca (paraphrasing Mary Oliver, [81:37])

On Lahiri’s Characters

• “She doesn’t allow us to paint Shukumar as a villain. Right. And in 'This Blessed House' too... Sanjeev’s not allowed to be a villain here either. There’s a compassion that she writes into her characters and really demands of us as readers as well.”
  — Laura ([19:40])

On the Book’s Reception and Place in Canon

• “For those who actually read Interpreter of Maladies... it's a real reader’s, if you know, you know, kind of book.”
  — Rebecca ([37:44])

• “If you like short stories, but somehow you have never read Jhumpa Lahiri, just like run, do not walk to these. Just go do it.”
  — Rebecca ([88:27])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro & Why This Book: [01:08]–[06:15]
• Book Themes & Dignifying the Ordinary: [05:07]–[06:59]
• Highlights of Individual Stories: [07:14]–[20:02]
  • “A Temporary Matter”: [07:20]–[12:25]
  • “This Blessed House”: [15:31]–[20:02]
  • “A Real Durwan” / “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar”: [20:04]–[22:52]
• Short Story Publishing History: [22:52]–[37:44]
• Lahiri’s Background: [38:46]–[44:42]
• Poe, Short Story Theory, & Single Effect: [56:05]–[61:42]
• Form vs. Collection Tension: [62:27]–[67:00]
• Lahiri’s Craft & Character Compassion: [67:58]–[77:12]
• Big Questions & Final Reflections: [89:26]–[94:08]

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For Further Reading / Read-Alikes

• More Lahiri: Unaccustomed Earth, Roman Stories (in Italian, self-translated)
• Other Contemporary Masters:
  • George Saunders: Tenth of December
  • Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!
  • Junot Díaz: Drown
  • Karen Russell (short stories)
  • Lauren Groff (stories and novels)
• Classics/Regionalist:
  • Bobbie Ann Mason: Shiloh and Other Stories
  • Ann Beattie (short stories)
  • Willa Cather: My Ántonia
  • Alice Munro, Zora Neale Hurston
• Recent Standouts:
  Ghostroots by Pemi Aguda

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Cocktail Party Takeaways

1. Interpreter of Maladies is the rare debut collection that won the Pulitzer (and in paperback!), selling over 15 million copies—a singular literary event.
2. Lahiri’s stories dignify ordinary lives, focusing on the emotional complexities of displacement, relationships, and seeing (or not seeing) the hidden lives of others.
3. The collection is a showcase for the “single effect” of great short stories—a tradition going back to Poe.
4. The book changed how short stories were viewed in American publishing and is essential reading for understanding the contemporary canon.
5. Read one story at a time, savoring each complex, jewel-like piece, and letting its emotional effect land.

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Should You Read This?

Absolutely: If you care about literary fiction, the short story form, stories of immigration and identity, or simply want to know why this book is so often cited as a modern classic.

Maybe Not: If you require clear plot resolution or want to avoid emotionally heavy explorations of loss, grief, and ambiguity.

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Final Rating

• Historical Importance: 8/10 (Unique publishing feat; literary and institutional influence)
• Readability: 9/10 (Highly accessible, but takes emotional breathers)
• Central Relevance: 9/10 (Questions of belonging, interpretation, noticing, and connection are timeless)
• Book Nerd Cred: 8.5/10 (Canonical but approachable)
• Oh Damn Factor: 10/10 (“Gut punch” effects across nine powerful stories)

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Noteworthy Quotes

“Each meal I have eaten, each person I have known... as ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
— "The Third and Final Continent," discussed by Laura ([77:12])

“Believe me, don’t believe me, you couldn’t even dream this.”
— "A Real Durwan," recurring theme noted by Laura ([84:33])

“Interpreter of Maladies is not only a really singular achievement...but also just a gorgeous, gorgeous book on the page at the sentence level.”
— Laura McGrath ([03:15])

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Interpreter of Maladies endures as a benchmark in American literature—for its empathy, style, and the sheer power of the short story form.

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Transcript

[A]

Zero to well Read is sponsored by Thriftbooks.com today on the show we're talking about Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, a contemporary classic, a modern masterpiece, something that Rebecca and I both love. And we're joined by a special guest. You're going to hear about one of the quirks of this book. It was a paperback original, so for I'm not I sometimes have a collector's heart and sometimes I don't, but I really want this in a paperback if you're getting one of these. Weirdly, the original cover design, it's a little hard to find in the original paperback. I'm not even talking about first edition, but like subsequent reprints. But there is a hardcover that's available in the first edition. Cover design, orangey, gauzy hued with a couple of candles on it. That's the one I really want there. Most of them you're going to find have the winner of the Pulitzer Prize sticker I think actually printed on there. If you can find one that doesn't grab you one of those because that's their super rare, you can browse those in other editions on thriftbooks.com thanks to them for sponsoring this episode of Zero to well Read. Welcome to Zero to well Read, a podcast with everything you need to know about the books you wish you read. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.

[B]

And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. This week we're delving into our first short story collection, Jhumpa Lahiri's 1999 debut Interpreter of Maladies. And we have a very special guest joining us. Dr. Laura McGrath is an English professor, literary historian and data scientist. Listeners of the Book Riot podcast might have heard her over there where she's our regular publishing data correspondent and her book Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction is out today. As you're hearing this, Laura, thanks for being with us.

[C]

Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure to talk to you and I love this podcast so much. It's a delight.

[A]

We're going to ask Laura why she's here for this book in just a second. Rebecca and Laura ganged up to make this plan. I'm delighted to be a part of it. But but before we do that, remind you can remind you, you can find the link in the show notes to sign up for our free newsletter. I'm sure Vanessa will cook up all sorts of things. Probably the document here Laura's provided with all kinds of interesting back matter that really matter For a book like this, which is a one of one in so many ways.

[B]

It is.

[A]

Which we're going to talk about as we get into it here. That'[e-mail] 02 well read you have a moment to rate and review the show wherever you're listening. You can always email us at 0 to well read@book riot.com youm don't have to email us to rate and review that that comma Rebecca. I just roll right into the email. Reviewing is separate from E. Lingus. Please do both podcasts on Apple Spotify wherever you get to. We just got included in the Essentials for Books and Apple Books podcast category, which is very cool. A sign of all of you listening and rating reviewing and people are finding the new show that way as well. All right, with that. Rebecca or Laura? Why Interpreter of Maladies? We wanted Laura to have come on because the literary agents making American fiction, how these books get made and by whom. There's a lot of story here. Is it just that you like this book, Laura? Rebecca, did she pitch this to you? How did this happen?

[B]

We were talking about having her come on zero to well Read at some point because Laura's just such a fount of interesting information. And it was like, what's a book that you love that you also know some really fun stuff about? And she said, interpreter of Maladies. And I said, say no more. I love that book. Let's do it.

[C]

I think the short story collection generally does not get anywhere near as much love as it should. There's a million reasons why that's the case. But when you look at it from the perspective of a literary agent, it really makes no sense that short story collections continue to exist. And yet they do for a lot of really important reasons. And so Interpreter of Maladies is not only a really singular achievement of late 20th century publishing, but also just a gorgeous, gorgeous book on the page at the sentence level. It's just such a pleasure to spend time with. So this seemed like the very obvious zero to well read choice.

[A]

I was trying to think about this and looking at my notes and putting some thoughts down and we'll get to in a second. Like, is this. Is this the most prominent short story collection of my lifetime that was published in my lifetime? Rebecca, you have later down in the notes that the last short story collection to win the Pulitzer Prize was A Visit from the Goon Squad, which at the moment felt like a bolt of lightning at the time also doesn't really

[B]

feel like a short story collection.

[A]

Yeah, That's Jennifer Egan doing Jennifer Egan things. And Laura, as we'll get into. Into this, you have a lot of notes. Like, Lahiri feels like an expression of the short story in a classic tradition. And we can talk about what that is or that modern late 20th century tradition as well. And not for nothing, this. This book sold. Let me check Laura's notes here. Oh, yeah, a bajillion copies. Which is sort of one of the reasons that makes it fascinating too, because from a readily point of view, it delivers the goods in a way that, you know, some short story collections can and that like literally everyone who cared about even trying literary fiction at all read this at some point between 1999, like 2012. So there's a lot there for us. At the same time, we'll get into our individual stories here. Rebecca, the synopsis for a short story collection is more difficult, even more difficult than Joy Luck Club, which is linked. What is this book?

[B]

This is. Yeah, this is a little tougher. So we'll talk about the themes of the collection. It's nine short stories, just a little under 200 pages, and they span the US and India, set mostly in the late 20th century, really, about identity, relocation, dislocation, and all of the emotional impact of that. There's a lot of loneliness, there's a lot of longing. There's a lot of the search for community and the kinds of experiences that members of a diaspora, whether it's here, Southeast Asian diaspora or any other real immigrant community, sort of common experiences there. A lot of the stories explore the immigrant experience in the us how place is connected to our identity and our relationships. And there are really complex families, there's troubled marriages, and then there's also just the drama of everyday life, which is one of my favorite things about Lahiri. Just these, like, small, quiet moments of everyday life and everyday relationships that are so sharply observed and beautifully written. She tells you so much in the first paragraph of a story about who these people are. And Laura, you have a note here about dignifying the ordinary, if you want to say something about that.

[C]

Yeah, I. I think the characters that are in this novel, but then also the details that Lahiri leaves us with, have a lot to do with not just the drama of everyday life or showing us that which is dramatic or curious about everyday life, but finding the beauty and the most mundane household objects in the most mundane life routines and elevating them to the level of the short story through such gorgeous language, I think is really a part of her project here. And at the heart of how she is thinking about how these two cultures interact in the lives of these characters who are thinking through, as you said, Rebecca, identity and relocation and dislocation.

[B]

Yeah. I wondered if, just to give listeners a little more of a taste of what happens in some of these stories, should we each talk about a story that we have some affection for? I know, Laura, you and I have the same favorite in this collection. So I'll give you, as our special guest, you can start with.

[A]

I mean, this is one of the special short stories. I don't. It's not just you guys. I'll type in here. This is one of the special short stories.

[B]

Yeah. The story that opens the A Temporary Matter is, I think, maybe my favorite short story in all of modern English.

[C]

I mean, it's just. It's just a gut punch. So A Temporary Matter is the story of Shobha and Shukumar. And they are a married couple living outside of Boston in their mid-30s. And they are. They are experiencing a rift in their intimacy. We learn over the course of the novel that they have suffered a great loss, the great loss of their infant who was stillborn, and all of the drama around that. Shu Kumar was not there. He was away at an academic conference. And an Shoba had to endure the birth of her child and the death of her child alone. But all of this comes to a head. They haven't talked about it. And they're experiencing so much independently rather than together. And so this strange circumstance happens where the power is being turned off in their neighborhood for a brief period of time each night. And so they have to have dinner together by candlelight every night or sit on their porch in the darkness. And they decide to play this game, which is, let's tell each other something we've never told anyone. And Shukumar experiences this as a rebirth of the intimacy in their relationship that they start speaking to one another again like they haven't for years. And they start remembering why they were in love in the first place and rekindling their marriage. And at the end, Shoba tells him that she's leaving him. And he realizes that what he has experienced as a rekindling of intimacy was in fact, for her, sunsetting. And he responds by telling her what he has never told her, which is that he had the opportunity to hold their baby after he was born. And he knows that the baby was born a boy, which is something that Shobha never wanted to know. She didn't want to hold the baby. She didn't want to know anything. About it because she wanted to spare herself this grief. And so it is like a slap in the face to learn that Shoba's leaving and then a literal punch to the gut to hear, not just hear this information about the baby, but to hear him convey this to her in this desire to hurt her in this really just, yeah, painful, painful way. So that's a long way of saying this story ends with just this dramatic reveal on several levels and of the two of them crying for what they now knew is, I believe, how the last sentence ends. And you're just left to sit with that feeling and to dwell in that. And there is no resolution and there's nothing that's healed about this relationship. And you as the reader are forced to not heal and not resolve with them and to sit in that pain with them, which is a heavy load, a heavy burden, but something that Lahiri does just really, really brilliantly. It's a virtuosic short story.

[B]

It really is. It's incredible.

[A]

Go ahead, Rebecca. I feel like we could do a whole episode on that story like we did for Botter Plead like there's a lot there because also it strikes me curious. Rebecca, I know this is one of your favorites. I'm going to try to tee you up here a little bit. But it also seems like a perfect short story for what we understand a capital S, capital S short story is in a certain kind of way. Neither. None of the three of us are craftspeople when it comes to writing, but we have long experience reading literary fiction and a literary fiction of a kind maybe, maybe best expressed by this single short story. Rebecca?

[B]

I think so. It's just a whole world in like 15 pages and you're dropped right into the middle of these characters relationship. As Laura was saying, there's no resolution. We don't know what happens to them after the realization that the marriage is ending. They'll presumably go their separate ways. But the reader is left to do a lot of the work and the slow reveal across these pages of what's actually going on here. Because Shukumar, like it's told in third person, but Shukumar is kind of our point of view character that the lights go down and she suggests let's tell each other something we've never shared before. And he does experience it as like it's exciting and it feels like this new door opens in their relationship. And then it turns out that actually like she's been doing something else. But what we want from, literally what I want from literary fiction is a window into like, here's a human experience that you haven't seen articulated in this way before. And Lahiri does it so concisely in each of these stories. But I think the real wonder of a temporary matter is like the story itself is temporary. There are all of these little things peppered throughout. These rolling brownouts are also temporary. This is only going to happen for a couple of nights. And she also drops all of these little breadcrumbs of other things. They have to use birthday candles the first night because they don't have real ones yet. So that too is temporary. She's just doing like. I mean, it's kind of hard. This is what we talk about when we talk about short stories like that. There's a fully realized set of characters and a fully realized world and a moment that you drop right into that sort of emotional experience of it.

[A]

Some weird inciting factor that this one seems banal, right? This fact that the power company said we're going to cut off your power from these particular nights. So that's well within the purview of sort of normal existence. Maybe you guys have lived through this. Our water is going to be out for a while. We're doing construction. And that disrupts their routine just enough for them to do something a little bit different. There's a caricature version of this lore that is, you know, these are heterosexual knowledge workers in their 20s talking about how they don't talk to each other and there was an abortion and I'm leaving you. But. But it's not. But it's not cliche at the same time or it is. I'm kind of wrestling with what she does that I don't know, elevates it out of the course, I guess, of a kit aparts of like a short story that one might badly write at the age of 25 or 26.

[C]

I mean, there's a lot to say about this short story specifically. There's a lot to say about the form of the capital S, Capital S short story that I think Lahiri is really tapping into. But what I love about this one and what I think Lahiri is really invested in here is the intention with which Sukumar notices and is curious about his wife. And perhaps that curiosity has waned over a period of time. But the details that he notices about her, like about how she sits and crosses her ankles when she sits and the way that she can anticipate certain things in recipes and stocks their pantry just so. I mean, there's not only a sense of the intimacy that's there, but a real sense of, you know, Lahiri understanding that love or attention here requires curiosity. And I think that that's something that we see consistently throughout these stories. Love in all of its varieties is something that motivates renewed and focused attention, something that motivates curiosity. And I think really her harshest judgments. I think she's a very compassionate writer, just through and through, but I think her harshest judgments are reserved for those people who are fundamentally uncurious. And I think that's something that's really beautiful in this one. This episode is brought to you by. Prime Obsession is in session. And this summer Prime Originals have everything you want. Steamy romances, irresistible love stories. And the book to screen favorites you've already read twice off campus L every year after the Love Hypothesis, Sterling Point and more Slow burns, second chances chemistry you can feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting.

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[C]

I love that story too. That was one that I had marked, I hope we talked about. I mean, I think there's a way that Twinkle, that character could have also been a sort of manic pixie, dream girl type.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

And Lahiri just does not let that happen. You know, in the same way that Shukumar. I understand that this, you know, in a temporary matter, this is a two sided relationship, but I'm, you know, I feel very deeply for Shobha in that story. But she doesn't allow us to paint Shukumar as a villain. Right. And in this blessed house too. It's Ranjeev, I believe, is the husband.

[B]

Sanjeev, I think.

[C]

Sanjeev. Yes. Thanks. He's not allowed to be a villain here either. Right. There's a compassion that she writes into her characters and really demands of us as readers as well. That I think is just. It makes these stories such a pleasure to read, I think. But also it asks quite a lot and it has high expectations for the readers as well.

[B]

Yeah. Jeff, what did you love?

[A]

I mean, the ones you said. I guess I'm going to put a little English on this and like, what is the one that I couldn't figure out how to figure out a little bit. And for me, that's the one in the middle. A real Derwan. There's two of these that are set in India. And this is where Borima, who is a refugee and has become a de facto door person for this Calcutta apartment building, is accused of theft, loses her position, and then gets marginalized and sort of pushed out of the building. Right. And I wasn't really sure what to do with it. In fact, I'm not really sure to do with both of the stories that are completely set in India because the Bibi Heldura story is not dissimilar about. There's this woman who's literally living on the fringe, the balconies and the basements. Both of these women are living at the edge of this little society, this little culture, but they work in opposite directions. Right. One gets pushed out, the other one gets reincorporated, where the community, I don't want to summarize it too much, but they essentially force out the family that was rejecting Her. And then she, like a hermit crab, takes their space. Right. Literally and figuratively takes their space, assumes their business, has a child mysteriously by. By man unknown, and seems to cure this series of epileptic fits. Is that what you guys were understanding? We're never giving a real diagnosis here. And for something which is so obviously about diagnosing illness, this is the one real illness we get. And it's presented as this puzzle box that is cured by being integrated into society in some way. Like, was that a successful version? Was that a counterpoint to a real Derwent? So those are the two I found myself looking at. And when I first read this, this is the first time I've read the complete short story collection since I first read the whole thing. I think Rebecca and I think talked about interpretive maladies and some of the other ones, but, like, thinking of it as a whole, I hadn't really looked at structurally. And so I noticed that I was starting to notice the arrangement. Right. Like, you can see. You can see the ending story, the third and final continent, as a response to a temporary matter at the beginning. Right. Those are. This is a coming together rather than a rending, much like the first India story is a rending and the second India story is a coming together. So I was kind of looking at. Is. Is there anything to say across stories? Because this is a point Laura has, like, what the hell do we do about talking about a short story collection? How do you do this? Because you do not have the tendrils of character or plot or tension or whatever that go through a novel. You really have to make these. I don't know, these. These structural jumps you have to see across character and across location to try to try to make that. So I was doing a little bit more of that, and I find that a very pleasurable, if frustrating process at the same time. Okay, Laura, why don't you lead off our why it's important section here?

[C]

Sure. This collection isn't. Is important for a number of reasons. I talk about it in my book for a number of reasons. But I think what's useful to know, to just give some background into what a short story collection is.

[A]

There you go.

[C]

A short story is, you know, a quintessentially American form. At least literary critics have treated it that way, like do not tell. Anton Chekhov, do not tell. But we like to think of it, we Americanists like to think of it as a thing that we've kind of got. Got a lock on and had been really important in the American Literary economy up until really the, the first quarter of the 20th century. But for all of these complicated reasons about copyright and the way that the US publishing industry developed, it was really short stories printed in magazines that were the moneymakers driving the American literary economy up until the mass market magazine kind of begins to take. Take a dive, which is pretty much in relationship to things like the birth of the paperback. So we know how to talk about a short story, and there's a whole big critical apparatus for that, and we can talk about that in a bit. But the short story collection is this very weird form where it takes these things that are otherwise considered to be disposable, right? Printed on newsprint in magazines that are meant to be consumed once in one sitting, read it and then throw it away or recycle it or line your birdcage or whatever. And it makes them a little bit more permanent by like putting a cover on them, by binding them, by making them something that stays on your shelf that you can collect, but they've never sold well. There was no, like Glory day of the short story collection. They have always just been these very weird things that no one entirely knows what to do with.

[B]

The redheaded stepchild of publishing.

[C]

Exactly, exactly. And you know, I spent a ton of time looking at like, archives of trade journals and things. And I think one truism or one, you know, very clear fact, if you study publishing history is like, there was no good old days. Like there was never a point where publishers thought, you know, what the mid list going strong. Like, no, it has always been bad and the industry kind of thrives on that, that sort of lore. But the same thing was true with the short story. I assumed when I first started researching it that the collection had a heyday along with the short story itself, but it didn't. So even in 1941, I loved this review of Eudora Welty's first short story collection. Publishers Weekly was writing. The book Tradesman still accepts without question the axiom that books of short stories do not sell. So even in 1941, when we. I would have expected the short story collection to be doing very successful. It is already, like common knowledge, tried and true. These things are total commercial flops. Like, they don't work even for you. They're not going to work.

[B]

And it remains so true that in the Book Fantasy League, the three of us are in with our colleague Sharifa. If, if one of your books is a collection of short stories and it notches like a big book club selection or an award shortlist, you get a multiplier of points on that because short stories get so little love.

[C]

So, so little love. So keep that in mind. And not only do short story collections receive so little love, but debut short story collections receive even less love. So in the 21st century, you know, as we think about things that have happened post Lahiri, you know, the short story collection serves several interesting functions. You know, maybe a writer worked on it in the MFA program, but the agent might suggest to them, you know, just hold on to it until you're a well known novelist. Maybe we'll go out with it in a two book deal. We'll just kind of hang on to it later or expand the short stories into a novel. Because the debut short story collection is just a very challenging thing to sell. In fact, only 1.2% of books acquired each year are debut short story collections.

[B]

Wild.

[C]

That is the smallest possible slice of the fiction pie. So this is where we're going, right? This is the condition that Lahiri puts interpretive maladies out into the world. This is what she's facing. And she writes this story collection. We can talk a little bit. I know, Rebecca, you've got a lot to say about Jhumpa Lahiri and where she was before this, but there was basically zero publicity for this book. Just zero. She loses her agent in the middle after the book is sold, but before the book comes out.

[B]

Oh, my God, poor thing.

[C]

And so she is recommended another agent who is. We could talk about him a little bit later, but at the time was not especially established. Was kind of still making his name, but had worked with a lot of short story writers already and was kind of being known as someone who was a champion of the form and with basically zero publicity. This is a paperback original, was not released in hardback. It becomes this word of mouth sensation after it was published.

[B]

So it goes like a short story collection becomes a word of mouth sensation is just a thing that doesn't happen.

[C]

Yeah, it was really booksellers who made this short story collection begin to take off. Booksellers and the New Yorker. So Lahiri has this wonderful coup where two of the stories that were published here in Interpreter of Maladies end up also being published in the New Yorker, which is kind of like the holy grail for the writer of short stories. Is publishing something in the New Yorker that.

[A]

I mean, it's the last one, right, Laura? Like, where else. Where else can you get us? I mean, even now is the New Yorker the last bastion of spotlighting a short story Pretty much.

[C]

I mean, you can publish short stories in Harper's or the Atlantic or Plowshares

[A]

or wherever you want to go, right?

[C]

The New Yorker pays. The New Yorker is the last message that pays.

[B]

I heard George Saunders give an interview recently where he talked about finding out the first time he got a short story in the New Yorker. And just like the feeling of, oh, my God, it's all about to start, like, this is the way in to the world of publishing. Because the New Yorker publishes, like, so many fewer short stories in a given year than publishing puts out books. Like, it's a very exclusive club. And getting in that door opens doors into other avenues of publishing if you don't already have a book deal.

[C]

And it matters so much for writers. I mean, you know, Junot Diaz sells Drown basically on the strength of New Yorker short stories. His agent, Nicole Araji, had sent the book out and was kind of getting bites, whatever. But then I think it was how to Date a Black Girl, Brown Girl, Haffy comes out in the New Yorker. And Araji is able to go back and tell everyone, look, well, this New Yorker story just came out. And Drown becomes the mega sensation that it is, right? That really boosts the sale here. That didn't happen for Lahiri. Her book was sold before the New Yorker published her short stories. But. And this, I think, gives us a grounding of where we're at in literary history. Really important for this novel was that the editor, the fiction editor at the time was Bill Buford. He's Putting out in 1999 the fiction issue, where he anoints the writers who he believes, from the standpoint of 1999, are going to be the writers to watch in the 21st century. And these are the people that we're going to be reading and talking about, and they're going to matter. And Lahiri is one of them. As a part of this debut short story collection, she was kind of named as one of these writers to watch. And we need to give it to Bill Buford for a moment.

[B]

This is a murderer's row of other writers.

[C]

I know he knows how to pick them. So not only do we have Jhoom Billahiri, also have Sherman Alexie, Michael Chabin, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Jonathan Franzen, Chang Rae Lee, Jonathan Letham. I'm not done. George Saunders, David Foster Wallace. I mean, this is like, you could teach and people do. This is a contemporary American literature class, start to finish, right? Jeffrey Eugenides is in this list, too. I don't know if I said him already.

[B]

Holy cow.

[C]

I mean, come on. Like the company that he assembles here. I was gonna say the company that she keeps. It's hard to imagine a moment when George Saunders wasn't quite George Saunders yet or when David Foster Wallace wasn't quite David Foster Wallace yet. But you can put yourself in that mindset and think of this group of young writers that is all collectively coming up and being named by this important establishment writers to watch. And from there, gradually, with the strength of the New Yorker short stories, with all of this publicity from. From Buford and the acclaim that gets heaped on her from the tried and true salt of the earth army of booksellers that are hand selling this book all across the country. It sells out many times, but it also wins the Pulitzer Prize. It is the first time a paperback original has ever won the Pulitzer. Surprise.

[A]

And this is for those of you may not know, a paperback original is not in hardcover. Like this happens from time to time. And it's hard to really articulate what it means, Laura. But it's essentially like we don't think this is a giant commercial winner necessarily. Like if we think this is going to sell a bunch of books, we put in hardcover so we can get those sweet, sweet dollars. But it's also sort of a signal of something else, and it's a little hard to articulate. Laura, how do you understand what a paperback original really is signifying?

[C]

I mean, I think a paperback original. Well, I mean, I can say more of what a hardcover would be signifying. Not only is there a higher price point and so publishers stand to make more money off of it, but it also is signifying something about the staying power of the writer. Right. Like this is a collector's item now. This is something that you want to put in your library. This is something that you'll want to hang on to and that you should have in this first edition. It might somehow be valuable eventually. A paperback original is like really just a step above the magazine in some ways, right? It's not that, like, I don't want to totally neg paperback originals, but it's not doing the same sort of work for a writer's prestige as the hardcover is.

[B]

Gosh. And it sells. It sells 15 million copies.

[C]

15 million copies. That was the last number I have been able to find. But I am sure it has bonkers four copies since.

[A]

I wonder how many copies it sells in a week right now.

[B]

Oh, now, yeah.

[A]

No idea.

[B]

It's still on those paperback favorite tables. And Past award winner tables. I think like a Pulitzer medal on the COVID of a book does a lot of work for the rest of its life cycle but well, and then

[A]

her subsequent books were super popular. So people would then go back and pick that one up.

[B]

Right. Still a player, but just, I mean incredible, the whole combination of variables here that it's a paperback original, it's a debut collection of short stories and then it goes on and wins the Pulitzer. Like as Jeff was saying at the top the of of the show. That's a really small group. I think only seven short story collections period have won the Pulitzer for fiction. This is the first paperback original. It's one of the only debuts. And like that was the book comes out in 99 and so it wins the Pulitzer in 2000. The next time a so called short story collection won The Pulitzer was 2011 with a visit from the goon squad, which is more of like a novel in stories, linked short short stories kind of vibe. Like I really think that there's a case for this is the last time that a true short story collection won the PULITZER. It's been 25 years.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Can I try out this cultural analog on you guys to let me. I was trying to think like what is the equivalent of this in some other media mode. I was like, okay, so Laura was saying we still publish short story collections. We don't acquire many of them. And even the ones that we do, we probably shouldn't because they're going to lose money anyway. Like even that we do 1.2% is probably still a money losing effort on those. But people do it for artistic reasons for you know, getting in on someone's career early kinds of reasons. And also there's a prestige and sort of a feeling of like this is in the furtherance of the literary tradition to cultivate the short stories, cultivate young writers in this regard. I was thinking in movies it's sort of the equivalent of documentaries, right?

[C]

Yep.

[A]

They generally don't make much money. They're made out of passion, out of. There's great, there's great documentarians, but very rarely do they win the Academy Award or maybe never do they ever get a nominated even. And I was like, okay, what documentary? What like blew out expectations that everyone sort of heard about. And the only one I could come up with, the March of the Penguins, you guys probably remember this made $133 million. But it's like if March of the Penguin then went on to win the Academy Award for best Picture, like I can't Quite finish the analogy, because there's nothing like it. But. But. But that'd be the closest I could come if March of the Penguins won the Academy Award. That would be interpreter maladies. How did I do? Can we do any better than that?

[B]

The first time someone has linked Jhumpa Lahiri and March of the Penguins, you heard it here, folks.

[A]

So. Because I don't really know what else it would be, right. Or, you know, there's. There's nothing really like it. And then the layer on top of that, which is more subjective, is that it's flipping good. Right. Because the March of the Penguins is amazing as a family movie, but it's also not, I don't think, among documentaries, like the pinnacle of the documentary as a form which. This feels like the end of one version of the short story with a

[B]

capital S. Capital S. This is a very fully realized. Like a full expression of what a short story can be.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

I think to go, I think, like the form in another media. I don't know how to get to like the winning the Academy Award or winning the Pulitzer Prize, but for what a debut short story collection is. I think it's more like art collecting. Like, I think it's more like sort of gallery scene of investing in a young. A young painter who's. Who's showing really early in their career, as opposed to, you know, someone who's much later on, maybe perhaps already in museums. The idea being like, this painting that I buy is going to accrue value over time, and someday this will be worth a whole lot of money, even if it's not right now. And it's that sort of collector's edge, that sort of gambling edge. Not. The debut gamble of this might be worth a whole lot of money right now, but I know this is worth no money right now, but maybe someday it could be.

[A]

Right? Yeah, right. You want that first, because then when that debut short story collector writer writes their novel, maybe it becomes a huge book. Right?

[C]

Or like Jhumpa Lahiri writes her second short story collection, right. Which debuts in hardcover as a number one New York Times bestseller. I mean, so debuts like its first week, first week out.

[B]

Yes. Incredible for a short story collection, too. Nobody does it wild.

[C]

And what I think is so useful, and where I think the art analogy does not serve Jhumpa Lahiri very well is, you know, this book has sold 15 million copies. Her short stories are also anthologized in the Norton Anthology of American Literature. They are routinely taught in classrooms. They are highly Cited by academics. Like, she is a writer's writer in so many ways that her. She's hitting. What do you do? What do you call it, Jeff? All of the quadrants. I think about it, like, popularity and prestige. Like, she has gotten the popular reader and she has secured the academic intellectual acclaim as well. Like, my daughter's preschool teacher and I were talking a few years ago when my daughter was in preschool, and I just asked, like, oh, well, teacher Leah, what's your favorite book? And she said, oh, it's Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lakh. Okay, great. There it is. I had.

[B]

I had moments like that this week where I told a couple friends that this is what I was reading, getting it prepared for the show. And both of them, granted, one of them teaches creative writing, but was like, oh, that book, everybody just kind of. It's a real reader's if you know, you know, kind of book. Because I went and looked. Also, I always checked the Goodreads ratings, and for having sold 15 million copies, there's only 200,000 Goodreads ratings. Which, like, like, furthers my suspicion that people buy a lot more short story collections than they actually read. But might also be that this book predates, like, you know, Goodreads being a thing. Let's talk a little bit about Lahiri, because she's also just fascinating. She was born in London. Her parents are Bengali immigrants, but the family moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts when Lahiri was just two. So she spent most of her young life growing up in and around Boston, where these short stories are set. And nine, she self publishes a book called the Life of a Weighing Scale that's written from the point of view of a bathroom scale, which I assume

[A]

is a horror story. I can only. That's where my mind went immediately. I don't want.

[B]

Anyway, I mean, it is, what, the 80s here? So.

[A]

Yeah, right.

[B]

Yeah, that's a real. That's a real possibility. But she won a school contest and so she got to have the book published and put in the school library. And this is like, where she gets the book bug. She also loved acting as a child, but found herself cast as a villain in school plays, probably because she wasn't white and blonde. Like, this is her suspicion. So she's just a child who's really invested in arts and creative expression from the get go. Gets a degree in English from Barnard in 1989. She wanted to be a college professor. Moved back to Boston to get a doctorate. Was working at a bookstore where she befriended a couple coworker whose dad was a poet. And she spent a lot of time with their family. And that's when she really started writing. So she starts writing short stories in 1997, which is two years before this book comes out. Like, incredibly short gap from the time she starts writing to the time she becomes one of the goats. A temporary matter, which is that story that opens the collection that we were talking about at the top of the show, is the first short story she wrote as a book at all, as an adult, which could be the pinnacle of a writer's career. And this is the first thing she writes, just like truly monumental. Also, just this woman loves education and learning. She has so many degrees. She's got advanced degrees from Boston University. She has an MA in English, an MFA in Creative Writing. She has an MA in Comparative lit and a PhD in Renaissance Studies. But she publishes this collection in 1990, or the collection is 1999. The story Interpreter of Maladies was published in 1998. It was included in Best American Short Stories and it won the O. Henry Prize. So she's got like a little buzz in addition to the New Yorker buzz happening. And then she goes on to write the Lowland, which is her another. That's a novel in 2003. The namesake is a novel. And then we get unaccustomed to Earth as well, which is that short story collection that comes out number one in hardcover. And now she's also doing this like head spinning thing with Italian, where for the last like decade or so, she's been at least some of the time living in Italy. She's become fluent in Italian. She starts writing in Italian and then Roman stories, her most recent collection. She writes in Italian and then translates into English herself. Just like maybe the most interesting person

[A]

working today, I think the three hour companion episode about Lahiri in Italian and what she's doing that will be dropping next week. You call in the feed that we're gonna do a couple.

[C]

Well, and she's translating too. She translates Domenico Starnone's novels as well, from Italian into English. And in my, my edition of Interpretive Maladies, Starnone writes the intro for her. So she's.

[B]

Oh, cool.

[A]

And then she translates it into English. Her own introduction from him about how great the book is. Can you do that, Laura? Do we need to throw a flag on this?

[C]

I don't know. Ask Samuel Beckett. We'll let him be the arbiter of translating.

[A]

Yeah, that's right. So some real Pirandello shit going on with that particular moment there so she. With the Lowland, right. In 2013, she kind of exits stage right from commercial publishing. She's reached the highest heights, ironically, after a book called the Lowland. She can sell. Really? She can sell as many as she. You can at this kind of writer's positions. Movies have been made. I don't know, man. She wrote this little book about book covers that I read and completely mystified me. Roman stories. We both really liked Rebecca. I read it first and I said, she still's got it. It just happens to be about people falling downstairs in Rome. But I don't know what to expect. She's returned to the States. She's now teaching. She has the. She's the director of Creating Creative Writing at Barnard. You could tell me whatever her next book is gonna be. It could be anything at this point. But I have felt her absence, I think, in American letters over the last couple decades.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's partially because, Laurie, you have a great point here about how few short story writers there are who, like, this is their principal craft and Lahiri is one of them. So I want you to say a little bit more about that.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I think there's just so. That's kind of my point. I mean, I think there's so few writers who, quote, make a living as short story writers. The only other person I can think of other than Jhumpa Lahiri is George Saunders. As someone who writes principally short stories, I mean, of course Saunders has his two novels. Lahiri has her novels too.

[A]

Right.

[C]

But when I think of people who work primarily in the craft and trade of short story writing, teaching in MFA programs, as they both do, you know, Lahiri is someone who comes to mind. And Saunders, although I think Lahiri, now maybe I'm wrong about this, but I think most of her day to day work is probably translation more than it is short story writing. And if Dr. Lahiri would like to talk to me about that, I would love to hear. There's just so few writers that are actually doing that. Partly that's because they're not commercial forms. So we see writers move from having written a short story collection as a part of their MFA program. Maybe they get to sell it, they don't want to waste it, they want to make something good of it. And so it might be a second book, it might be a part of a two book deal, but isn't necessarily the entree, so to speak. Or they might be convinced, you know, take that short story and make a novel out of it. So one of the short stories that I look at in my book is War Years by Viet Thanh Nguyen. And it was the first book that his agent or first short story that his agent, Nat Sobel, read. And Sobel reached out to Nguyen and said, are you interested in writing a novel? Not can I publish your short story collections? Not can we go out with this, but could you make this, this into a novel? And you can see, like, the seeds of the sympathizer are already there in that short story collection. And that's, I think, kind of the most common path, right, is you take the short story and you make it into a novel. Some people work, like, equally in both forms. Lauren Groff is someone who I think of as just as committed to the craft of the short story for what it is as for the novel for what it is. But by and large, like, this is not a form that. Because it is not a form that is commercial. It is not a form that anyone can, quote, make a living off of. And so it kind of falls out of the repertoire for most writers, I think.

[A]

I think, too, the point you made a little while ago, Laura and I don't know the history maybe as well as you do and others do, but I think it's not unreasonable to recognize to some degree commercial formats leading to artistic forms. Right. The short story doesn't really appear in a real way until the magazine. That's why Hemingway and Fitzgerald were getting paid like $5,000 per story for the Saturday Evening Post in 1921, which is an ungodly amount of money today. But then before that, like Dickens was serialized in newspapers, Right? It wasn't writing short stories because it was too long to fit into newspaper, but you could do a bunch of serials. And then really before that, you just had books. So even something like the Canterbury Tales or Don Quixote, which might be amenable to be published serial and short stories were still books because that's how you could get them to people. There wasn't these other printing techniques or markets for it. So I don't know that the, the wane, the sun setting, the. The long, slow graying of the short story as a form is something to be sort of artistically mourned so much as recognized that the form, the places it was made to go into just don't exist anymore. So of course it doesn't exist anymore.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, Aleph Bachimon, I think, would agree with you, you wholeheartedly on that, Jeff. I mean, so she wrote a great piece in M1 several years back, talking about the short story as a sort of zombie form that is just. It's really outlived its capacity any longer. So it exists as a pedagogical form in the classroom that teaches you how to read, right? Like that's what you teach in English classes because you can handle them in a class session. Short stories are my favorite thing to teach. Or it's how you learn to write because you can handle that over the course of a semester, you can work on a short story and. And workshop it over and over and over again. But without a publishing apparatus, without a media apparatus to support them, they just kind of die. They're not supported or sustained as products.

[A]

But can we together push back on that in this regard? Because I think Rebecca wants to do this too. Just because it was created out of a largely commercial form. I think what we discovered, sort of we, the collective, we have whomever that reads these things, like, oh, this form is cool. It does special things. And even if it doesn't sell, our own reaction to temporary matter. And like, you know, we've read short stories by Luis Erdrich together recently. We read Pemeguti last year. Goes like, this is part of our diet. There's specialness to a short story that even if it doesn't sell, may be worth sort of, I don't know. Could we put together the short story sanctuary off the coast, right? Like a protected area where the short stories can swim around and no one can sort of fish them. How can we? Because just because it was commercially inspired and that it's commercial, I don't know. Health is bad because those mediums are gone. Can we still keep the thing in some manner? And I don't know how to do that because as a reader, I like these. Just because I can't read them in magazines doesn't matter to anyone. Doesn't matter to me as a reader.

[B]

Like, all the commercial considerations aside, like, I understand the practical considerations you're talking about, about Laura of a short story is easier to teach in a class because you can get your arms around the whole text. And if you're trying to do a writer's workshop, it might be the way that writers develop their chops, but I actually think short stories are harder as a form to do really well because you have to do so much in a much more compressed time period. Karen Russell is interesting to me as a study in this contrast. I love her short stories. I think she can do so much much in 20 pages. But when she spins out to 400 pages in the Antidote. I'm like, we have too much going on. You get so much space in a novel that I think you get a little more. Each word has to count for less than it has to count for in a short story collection. And the degree of difficulty, I think, is different and possibly higher. And I just want these writers to get more flowers, I think is.

[A]

Well, let me ask what it's. Yeah, right. I think Rebecca's onto something there. Like, it's been a while since I taught a short story. How are students responding to short stories? Do they like to read them? Do you like to write them? Like, does it still work as sort of an artistic and pedagogical moment or not?

[C]

Well, I think pedagogically they're really useful because you can talk about the whole thing from start to finish in a class session, Right. So you can talk about things, unity, in a way that can become really challenging when you take a novel over, you know, four class sessions or six. Six class sessions, maybe two weeks on a novel is what I tend to spend. Right. So it might be really hard to talk about both how the last quarter of the novel concluded and then also to then do that sort of gymnastics work with the class, to then say, all right, well, now let's talk about how all of this gets kind of unified for us as readers. How did that thing that we talked about five class sessions ago that you might not remember anymore, like, how does that inform the way that we think about this ending? Or how do these strings get tied together or whatever? A short story, on the other hand, I mean, you've got the whole thing self contained. And so you can have those conversations about unity really upfront, and that can foreground the critical conversation, which is really. I mean, if you think about work as a literary critic, as a book critic, you're beginning from that point, right? You don't begin writing until you finish the whole thing. We often don't get that opportunity in undergraduate classes. And so I think the short story gets us closer to what. What kind of conversations you can have in a graduate class when you're reading a book. A week gets us a little bit closer to what literary critics actually do when they talk about a work as a whole. And that's something that I find just so immensely pleasurable with my students.

[A]

Well, Rebecca and I, we came up with short story club together, where you don't have book club. You show up and you have printouts for your 12 friends of your short story. And you read it for 20 minutes and then you talk about it for an hour. I think that would crush in a book club setting. I think people would get a lot out of your.

[B]

Get your club together. Everybody reads A Temporary Matter. You have a good cry.

[A]

Yeah. A couple people call divorce attorneys after the fact. You know, like, we have a really good time with it while we're on

[B]

the classroom setting stuff. Like, I think that's a nice way to go into our next section here about how we first encountered these. Because, Laura, you first encountered Jhumpa Lahiri in a classroom setting.

[C]

I did. I did. In my contemporary lit class in college. I read A Temporary Matter. It was anthologized and it wasn't the Norton Sexy is Her Story. That's. That's in the Norton Anthology of American Literature. It was something else, some other short story anthology. And we read A Temporary Matter. And I just remember that. That feeling of, like the air has gone out of me after I finished this thing. And I don't remember our conversation. I don't remember what my professor did with it. Like, I don't remember any of that, but I remember just the. The intensity of the.

[A]

Your eyes just went into cartoon X's and you just sat there the whole time, like, trying to recover existentially.

[C]

Yeah. Not only at the. The awe of the craft, but just of the. The ache that you. That you feel. Finishing this. This piece was just. It's really haunting. So that's. That's been my first encounter and it has stuck with me. Obviously, it's memorable.

[B]

I picked this up off of the Ring the bingo, Ring the bell. Hit your bingo card. I'm mixing my metaphor. Ring the bingo bell.

[A]

For $200.

[B]

I picked this up off of a Barnes and Noble paperback favorites table. I think in like 2002. I was in college and I. I'm pretty sure this was the first short story collection that I read on my own in my adult reading life, which kind of fits with the rest of the story about where this book sits in publishing and how it became so visible. And my husband and I had, like, been dating for a year. I loved him. I think I knew on some level, or I was starting to know that this is maybe the person I wanted to be with. And I remember A Temporary Matter hitting me about, like, first, it seems so romantic that they're like, they're sitting in the dark and they're finding their way back to each other and they're revealing these things. And then it's just like that gut punch of like, oh my God.

[C]

Right.

[A]

I'll ask you both this here. When you said that Rebecca were you. I was having an echo memory of the first time reading it. Assuming they were going to reconnect at the end of that story because of this moment.

[B]

Yeah. It seems so romantic. And I think the first time that I read it, I did think this is the path to healing. Like, I didn't know if she would give us resolution at the end, but I did not see the real ending coming. And I just remember being devastating.

[A]

Does our modern Internet theory speak of like therapy speak is you connect with people, you speak honestly. And that is the road to El Dorado. That is the road to healing, to reconnection and to sort of mutual understanding that's durable. This suggests that the opening up was a shutting down. I think even. I think a reader today would still find it surprising that the turn is that she's leaving. It's a surprising bed. Yeah.

[B]

And. And that he realizes that she has been. This is what she's been doing for the past three nights. Like that the point was never to reconnect but that she's been trying to like work herself up to be. To have the guts to say the thing. But yeah, I just remember being devastated.

[A]

I also read this in college. I picked it up. I was a senior of college. I think I didn't buy that too many new books when I was in college I had that much money. But I won a book collecting contest at the University of Kansas that came with a $500 gift card to the university bookstore. So I just went ham in the university bookstore and bought a whole bunch of stuff. And I'm pretty sure this was among that in that particular purchase. And I read it and I remember being blown away, though I was confused from the very beginning. I thought Interpretive Maladies was the name of the first story, not Temporary Matter. And I've always had to retranslate back to myself that A Temporary Matter is the first story about the lights going out. Interpreter Maladies is something else. I've just carried that burden with me forever. I will never get that boulder all the way put back on the top. It's always going to roll back down and crush me here.

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[C]

All right, all right. I want to talk about what a capital SS short story is. And I want to talk about this feeling that we've all been talking about, about reading these short stories. And I bring this back to Rebecca's point about the economy of language in a short story. These are all of the things that I'm going to talk about because it all goes back to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, which there are worse places to start in American literature, period.

[B]

But indeed there are.

[C]

Certainly if we're talking about the history of the short story, this is, this is kind of where we need to think and how we need to think about this in the United States. So Edgar Allan Poe, a master of short stories, in his 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales. So we are. This is deep cuts. Poe offers this sort of critical approach to the short story that has really guided the way that scholars and critics have thought about what a short story is designed to do and has really guided the way that short story is being taught as craft in creative writing workshops and in undergraduate workshops as well. So I guess I will just read Edgar Allan Poe.

[B]

Do it girl.

[C]

All right, so Poe talking about Hawthorne is writing about what a writer of short stories has to do with.

[B]

Here we go.

[C]

I quote, if wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents. His in this case is the writer of short stories. But having conceived with deliberate care a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents. He then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect, if his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted, which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. So what we take from this is Poe's emphasis on the single or unique aesthetic effect. And that guides both the writing of the short stories, right? It's that feeling, it's the effect that you need to leave that should guide be the kind of target through which every kind of sentence arrow is aimed, but also the way that we need to read them, right, with that single effect in mind. And that guides that economy of language that Rebecca is talking about. But that's also what produces that sort of. Of gut punch that you get, or the haunting or the lingering sense of each of these short stories. And we've talked about a few of them, right? Like A Temporary Matter is one of them. I feel this way at the end of Third and Final Continent. I feel this way at the end of the treatment of Bibi Heldar as well. But Lahiri really has made these sort of gem like stories in this achievement of this kind of principal aesthetic effect in this tradition that that really Hawthorne and. And Poe set out through their conversation, their literary conversation with each other.

[B]

Hell of a job there, Laura.

[A]

That's a great pull. I mean, and if you read some, like Bartleby the Scrivener, which we talked about on this, or the Gilded Cispis by Zora Neale Hurston, or Hills Like White Elephants, they all the ones that sort of survive. And I think what Laura's suggesting here, that's a chicken and egg sort of situation. The ones that survive do the thing because they do the thing we say the ones that survive do in that particular way. It's really fascinating to see. And it's fascinating to me that Poe then at the very end has to use a painting as a metaphor, right? Because it's much more. You almost aren't supposed to. It's almost like if you could see the whole short story at once and grok it, that would be preferable to even having reading sentences in order. I guess it's almost more like High Cuisine where you take the bite and all at once you get all of the effort and art that's been put into that bite to destroy that one one effect that even though you have to go through this linearly, where you can't see the end at the beginning is a frustration to the Platonic. Well, it's not even the poetic Poe dash etic articulation of the short story here. And it's not. You don't get this in other kinds of writing. Generally speaking, I guess the closest might be a kind of a poem in a way, but that's the closest thing.

[B]

I think that's a really great analogy, actually. Like, the way that I feel when I have finished reading a good poem is similar in power to how I feel at the end of a great short story that, like there is this singular effect. I'm so grateful, Laura, that you pulled this quote because now I feel like I have vocabulary for this response I have to short stories that I had never quite been able to articulate before. So like also snaps to Poe for doing that for us. But I think that poetry link is right, Jeff, that there is something. There's just something like a little extra magic about a really good short story that a novel can do, but a short story does it better. And a really carefully assembled collection is such a thing of beauty that we've probably all read short story collections that are mostly just like they are collected in that the author published these stories over 10 or 20 or 30 years in a bunch of different publications, and now they're gathering them together. And that can be much less effective to me than something like this where the writer has worked over just a couple of years concerned with the same themes they're telling. Each story tells a story on its own, but the collection of them tells a story together about what the author's primary concerns are. It's really, really great stuff.

[C]

Well, I think that's really telling and that's a really interesting transition, Rebecca, I think to talk about something else that you wrote here. So Poe was reviewing Twice Told Tales, but this is a statement about the singular short story, right? This is not a statement about the story collection. It is. This is what it means to read a story. And actually, lots of scholars have keyed in on this question of the poetry as well, that it's not poetry broadly, but the lyric. And my poet friends have recently let me know that that is no longer a fashionable way of thinking about what lyric poetry does. But at least for a while, short stories were thought to resemble the lyric. But you know what Lahiri manages to do, as you've written here, Rebecca, is achieve this effect not just the one time, but nine times and working through it again and again and again and again.

[B]

Yeah. You had a great question in our notes, Laura, about were you able to read these stories back to back? I am not. I have to read each one and take some breathing room, like let them have their own space. How do you approach it, Jeff? How did you approach the collection?

[A]

I took it one by one and I think we're onto something here. There could be an internal tension between this idea of each story trying to achieve a signal specific effect. But then how do you put those nine effects next to each other and do they add up to something more than just. I don't want to say just those. Does something emerge from those nine amuse bouches or d' oeuvres or something? Does it actually turn into a coherent menu of some kind? And I'm actually not sure. Like they. Some of them. Some of the flavors seem related, but I almost feel like it's a disservice to each individual story that then have to yoke it to the others in order to achieve some other meaning. So taking them one by one, I find for this collection and maybe most short story collections, that's enough for me. Maybe someone smarter or more erudite than I am can do something else or can glean something from it. But I don't find I need to do more than nine individual bytes, each one of them with complexity and care and subtlety of their own. So I did read them individually because I wanted to give it space to like sit with it for a minute. Laura, I mean, did you have to. Did you do that intentionally or is that just like you were too stunned, like you couldn't even get off the mat after each punch?

[C]

I sometimes I just couldn't read them. Read another one afterward. I was really affected this time around by Mr. Perzada came to dine as well. Where my first time and my second time reading this through that was not one of the more memorable stories for me, but really stuck with me this time. But mostly I like. And one of my hot takes here is I actually think the short story is like the cure to our attention ailments. Right. Like this was.

[A]

Totally agree.

[C]

The right length to say, like, I'm going to read this now. I have time before my children wake up and I can drink this delicious cup of coffee and sit here in silence and mostly dark on my couch. Or I'm going to read this before I go to bed and this is how I'm going to, to direct my limited attention and limited time right now in the most beautiful and edifying way I can imagine. And so I read them one at a time, mostly just by necessity in terms of what, what life with two little children is like. Right?

[A]

Sure. Yeah. Well, counterintuitively, I think it actually gives you more space to pay attention than to have longer work. Right. Because there is the, the tyranny of plot will keep you turning pages and it, it allows you to avoid inspection or really considering what's going on beyond the plot. Right. And I like a good plot as much. Well, okay, not as much as everyone, but I do like plot sufficiently well. But you know, you can move along and get through it and there becomes a momentum of reading and something especially that you really like, you, you're going to inhale that. Right. They're going to get more of those pages and the velocity of page intake works against, you know, doing something else on a line basis.

[B]

There's like an idea maybe among folks who are less familiar with short stories that they're like an appetizer and the novel is the main event and that there's something less realized about a short story or like less. There's less cachet. Maybe I don't. Which is also complex because short stories have this aura of being like difficult and intimidating for some readers because we get emails from listeners to the Book Riot podcast who are like, I just don't know how to get into short stories. And it's like, but you could read a 500 page novel. I don't understand that complexity. But I guess to quote Lizzo, like with, with Lahiri especially, the short story is not a snack at all, baby. It's the whole damn meal. And each of these is a complete, each of these nine is a complete experience in itself. And that you can have that complete, satisfying literary experience in like 30 minutes per story. I also really love that these stories are about the same length. Each, like some collections are pretty uneven and you'll get like a three page story and a 20 page story and then they throw the 75 page novella into the middle and it can be like hard to find your rhythm with them. But whether that was intentional or not, Lahiri is really consistent here with, with how long each experience takes. And I, I also appreciated that like I had some great coffee moments with these, like you did Laura, and some great end of the day time. And I just, I didn't want to like plow through it. I just wanted to give each one

[A]

its moment I'm gonna throw it to here in a second, Laura, but I'm going to quote the great 2008 masterpiece, Star Trek the Movie Reboot, written and directed by JJ Abrams.

[B]

We are all over the board today.

[A]

There's a moment in there I think about all the time in which Spock is going up against Captain Kirk in a training exercise. And some of the other officers are worried, like Kirk is. He's too. There's. He can do whatever. You don't know. You don't know what he's going to do. And Spock says something like, he can only be who he is. So whatever he's going to do is going to come from his essential character. And if we know something about him, we may be able to divine that he is going to surprise us. So be on the look. The. So I always think about they are who they are. And Lahiri, this book feels. If each individual story doesn't resist or I am resisting trying to draw direct parallels, I feel Lahiri ness in all of them. And Laura, I think you had something underlined about her compassion for her characters. That maybe is the thing that feels most like Lahiri. Her own humanity, her own character, her own sensibility seeping through. Could you say more about that?

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I think I mostly said what I wanted to say about this at the top, but I just don't. It's really hard to find a villain amongst these stories. And maybe that's also because these short stories, generally speaking, but these resist real plots. And so the need for an antagonist is not particularly strongly felt in most of these. But, you know, in even those stories where you see people behaving very badly, there's still a sense of, I don't know, compassion or tenderness, I think that Lahiri has toward them of not necessarily like recuperating everyone, like, you know, understanding, like everyone's villain origin story like that. That's not. That's not it at all. But.

[A]

Right.

[C]

You know, in understanding our. Our pettinesses and our gripes as. As being these things that are a fundamental core part of our humanity as well, and exploring that in fullness requires, if not accepting at least acknowledging and having some tenderness, some sensitivity or some compassion toward those aspects of the fullness of human life as well.

[A]

Yeah. One thing she does, if she were a chess player, maybe one of her recurring moves would. To like isolate upon. Right. We often get people on their own or in these weird two person combinations. Right. You know, a couple of instances where a kid is in relationship to an adult, like in the. The prasada. And then the later1 With Mrs. Shen, we get people who are now married or have been married for a while in a new apartment, in a new building. Like, she has a few moves that she goes to back and forth. Because I think what she's trying to do is hold for a moment someone in a particular frame of mind or frame of existence, and then sort of seeing what that actually means and what happens to them, or seeing someone else. Often having a realization about someone else is something that she does over and over again. So in terms of ideas, I'm not sure that's as interesting to me to look across the stories as looking at her particular sort of chess moves. Like, she likes to do this, right? She likes to put this person in this situation and then sort of see what happens in those particular kinds of things. And that's something you have here, Rebecca. Like, seeing through each other's eyes. It's very rare that we get, like, a classic epiphany from someone. And now I realize that the Secret Life was what we get something else, Rebecca. What do we get instead of that?

[B]

Yeah, you get this. Like, the characters are reflected off of and refracted through other people. So, like in this blessed house that I was talking about at the top of the episode, Sanjeev doesn't see Twinkle directly in a moment and then have a realization about her. He only can see her differently after he sees other people seeing her. And that, as you're saying, Jeff, like, that is one of Lahiri's moves. This comes up over and over, but I think that's also really true and really human. And it's one of the things that makes this book work so well, makes Lahiri's writing so resonant, is like, I have had this experience, certainly, of being with someone that I know intimately, but being out in a new environment with them. Maybe you're at a work event with a friend and you've never seen them in that mode before. And now you get to see them engaging and how other people respond to them. And there's something that, like, fleshes out their three dimensionality to you or makes them a little bit more dimensional than they were before, because you see them not just in a new environment, but in the new light of someone else's attention, which I thought the way she captures that is just so masterful.

[A]

Yeah, because you were. Used the word before, Laura. Curiosity. But it almost feels more fundamental than that. Like, it's about just seeing like, if you look at. And you're noticing and so, like, the details of the writer, you know, what they're making and what they're wearing and their affect, like, that's a special kind of care and attention, which I think is actually the Latin word of curiosity, comes from care and attention. If I think of. If I remember my Latin, which was very poor at the same time. And then she. I found you have here in the Interpretive Maladies section, or that story you are locating between Mrs. Das and Mr. Kapasi. Like, he becomes infatuated with her, but she doesn't return. She doesn't see him, or she does. Laura, like, how are you understanding that relationship between the. Those characters? Because that was a flash moment for me reading this again, is him watching her and then seeing him, not see him. I don't know if I caught that quite right, but maybe you could have followed me.

[C]

Well, so the Interpreter of Maladies is the key story. It's the title story of the collection, which I think is always. If we think about a theory of a collection or a way of theorizing what a collection is, I think that's a good place to turn. And it'd be useful to talk about moments where we see, particularly in this story, Lahiri kind of allegory her own position as a storyteller.

[A]

Right.

[C]

Which I think we see happening here. But, you know, so Mr. Kapasi explains that one of his other jobs is interpreting in a doctor's office. So because there are so many different languages and dialects in the region of India where he lives, and he speaks many of them. He works in a regional doctor's office and can help patients communicate fully to doctors, you know, based on whatever their. Their maladies are, so that way they can be treated. And Mrs. Dawes says, oh, this is so romantic. They're so dependent on you. If not for you, if not for this noble good work that you were doing, these people couldn't receive the medical treatment that they need. And Mr. Capacity reflects well, this is, you know, shameful to my wife. You know, it's. It's demonstrating that I don't have a job, that I make enough money that I need to have a second job. It reminds her of our child who died. You know, this is not anything that is romantic. I want to. To be a real translator, a literary translator. And now here I'm doing this kind of clerical work. But he sees himself again through this much more noble profession that Mrs. Dass does as it continues. Yeah. As the story goes, on and Mr. Kapasi begins to kind of romanticize this relationship and imagine this future in which he becomes infatuated with Mrs. Dass and maybe they have this long distance relationship. He starts to see that Mrs. Dass is simply romanticizing him, exoticizing him as in fact this person who is not fully human in any way, shape or form, but is just this conduit and receptacle for her own confession here, not as a person who has a full and capacious inner life and an imagination and wants to make a genuine connection. She sees him in a way that is not dissimilar from the way that her husband sees a man walking down the street, that he asks the car to pull over so he can take a picture of this man just purely as a tourist, as though this person's life is his for the taking and his for the capturing, you know, to put on his slideshow for vacation when he comes home. And so I think that's a really interesting moment where Mrs. Das sees, but is so fundamentally not noticing him, is just not curious about him or who he is as a person, but sees him purely as someone who can do something for her, who can render a service to.

[A]

For her.

[C]

And he's not willing to play the particular part that she's cast him in because that's not one that is in any way a reflection of what he feels or wants for the relationship, but also not a reflection of what he does and who he is.

[A]

It's so interesting because even that realization on his part is not, I don't know, internally motivated. It's more like a thwarting of a dream. Like there goes that dream from Banshees of initiation. Like once he realized he's not. She's not seeing him that way and so meant so many of these little realizations that people have are foisted upon them by circumstance. They're not like, boy, I really should get my together. Or boy, you know, things aren't really. I, you know, maybe I need to go take a yoga class or maybe I should write my mom or something like this. It's very much, you know, with Twinkle. Or at the end, at the end of. It's. It's brought about by these. These other circumstances with what's her name? The Centurion. Mrs. Cook. Is that her name? The landlord at the end of the book. Damn it, I can't remember a character's name to save my life. But like, he only so many times Mrs. Someone is about to say thank you.

[C]

I say Mrs. Couch because I have that leg.

[A]

Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. Yeah. They're put into proximity together and they sort of rub up against each other and. And one. Usually only one of the character realizes something. This is the spark does not happen on both sides of the flint and the steel. And it's. I think Lahiri is very interested in this. Like, how do you see your life? How do you get to a place where you can see your own life in some sort of way where you could do something about it, like existentially? And then how then do you re. Engage a life you feel you're living at a remove of some kind? And I think that's. The trailing smoke over most of these short stories is like, how if not, if you don't do it like this, how does one do it? Right, if you just sort of randomly bump into someone or you're given a new nanny, or you happen to run into a landlord that you have a weird moment of connection with. Can you stage these in your own life, or must you merely be a short story writer who can put these chess pieces on the board and move them around and see how they work together?

[C]

Well, this is my theory of what short stories do and what they are designed to do, which we can get into now.

[A]

We're going to get it. We've done this an hour and 15 minutes. Laura, you didn't want to start with your theory of short stories.

[B]

We're getting into some stray thoughts. Let's do it.

[A]

All right, let's do it.

[C]

Let's do the big questions that this book is asking of us and whether or not this is actually secretly all about art. I mean, so I gave you my hot take, but I think that short stories are our cure, our remedy for the malady of our lack of attention. But I also think that short stories are particularly about training and depression, disciplining and directing our attention. Right. Implicitly. They're always asking us to think about how we go about doing that. And I think that there's two quotes that I put here in the doc that I want to draw us to. One is from Mrs. Sens, which is a really lovely story. And Mrs. Sen is a woman who has immigrated to the United States. Her family all lives in India. And she becomes a babysitter. Oh, no. Did I. No, it's there. Okay. So she becomes a babysitter, and she's got this tape, a cassette tape that she listens to that her family all recorded. And that's how she can hold onto their voices. And she listens to it one day as she's grieving, she's learned that her grandfather has died. And the story is basically told from the point of view of this young 11 year old boy, Elliot, who is her charge for these after school nannying times. And it's her mother talking on the tape. And her mother says in this goodbye tape, right, this is meant to be this thing that is saying goodbye to her. The price of ghost rose to two or, sorry, the price of a goat rose two rupees. The mangoes at the market are not very sweet. College street is flooded. And then Mrs. Sen continues. These are the things that happened the day I left India. And on the one hand there's like nothing remarkable about this really at all. It's simply a snapshot and a capture of what life was like at any given time, of what her mother's day to day life is like. And that is intimacy, right? Like that's what a relationship is, more than it is any of these particular dynamics or particular events that happen. And so then in the third and final continent, which is the story that ends the collection, I think we begin to see Lahiri directing us to these patterns of attention. Where the goat rose two rupees or the mangoes aren't very sweet, where the narrator of this is talking about his son and the generational differences that he, as someone who's moved from India to London now to the Boston area, has dealt with, whereas his son, who's a first generation American, has not had to deal with. And he says, I know my achievement is quite ordinary. I'm not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I'm not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. And here, I think, is the kicker. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination. And that moment to me made me think of the cassette tape that Mrs. Sen has of these moments that are ordinary, that are also at the same time always beyond our imagination because of our capacity to direct our attention or not, or to train our attention or not, or to simply just pay attention or not. And that seems to me to be what a short story is asking of us, right? To set aside plot or what it feels like to move through the sensation of experience, of things happening and instead to pay attention to the world around us in new and fresh and compelling ways and find that in fact the price of a goat is something that is beyond our wildest imagination.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Can I build on that, Laura? Because I included the same quote, but I wanted to get the astronauts in there because I was thinking about this in the context of. Of your PO Quote, thinking about the whole point of the American space program was for Neil Armstrong's foot to stand, to get on the moon. Like that whole apparatus of inventing, basically, silicon wafers and rocket propulsion and orbital manics was just to put someone on the. The moon. And that seems to me to have that real winnowing effect you're talking about. Look at all the effort that goes into a transcendent moment like this. That may be beyond imagination, but the world is bigger than your imagination. So if you just look around, you're gonna see things you can't imagine, but you gotta pay fucking attention to it.

[B]

Yeah. I did not expect to be thinking about Mary Oliver in the conversation.

[A]

Well, you're always thinking about Mary Oliver. You and Spot like. Like Spock would say about Rebecca, she's always thinking about Mary Oliver. So just assume that Mary Oliver's gonna come up.

[B]

But like Mary Oliver, attention is the beginning of devotion. Like, there is something really present in Lahiri's stories about that. And I had not made that connection until we started this conversation. And this is why you want to talk about books you like with other people who like books.

[C]

It was, I have to say, I mean, you just were talking about the space program. It was very kind of emotional, too, to read Third and Final Continent, as I'm also watching stuff from the Artemis movie Passover, I guess. Well, now, by the time this is airing, they are all safely back on Earth, but it's been really lovely to watch those broadcasts and then to read this as well. Anyway, that's neither here nor there, but just a fun moment while this was all happening.

[B]

That's great. Should we continue with notable quotes then, since Laura?

[A]

Yeah, we kind of. Does anyone want to have one? They want to make sure they shout out, I've got one more that I

[C]

want to talk about.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I love. I just love the way she describes her characters. And so I pulled one that I. A couple that I really liked from when Mr. Pirazada came to dine. The narrator of the story says. I was charmed by the faint theatricality of Mr. Pirazada's rotund elegance and flattered by the superb ease of his gestures, which made me feel, for an instant like a stranger in my own home. Just. I felt like I could picture the man or I would have Recognized him on the street. And then a description of Buri Ma in a real Derwan. In fact, the only thing that appeared three dimensional about Buri Ma was her voice, brittle with sorrows, as tart as curds and shrill enough to grate meat from a coconut. Like, just wonderful. It's just wonderful.

[A]

It's also one of those things that. Done badly, really badly, where you get that three descriptions of various. You know, are they all. They're not brittle, tart, shrill, with a metaphor. Besides them. There's a real bad versions of this in short story MFA programs and undergrad writing all over the place. And it's. It's hard. It's hard. I find it hard to articulate the difference between a good version of it and a bad version of it. But I know this is a good version of it.

[B]

You know it when you see it.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Laura.

[C]

Oh, man. I. I actually had picks that boring MA1 too. But then I saw. I didn't include it, but I. Oh, I don't know what to stick with.

[B]

I.

[C]

Okay, so I was just surprised. This is actually a stray thought, less than a notable quote. I associate this short story collection entirely with these. These really pretty heavy feelings. Whether that's heavy moments of, like, elation and human connection, of like, how beautiful that everything is beyond our imagination or, God, this is so awful and heavy. And we're talking about the death of a child and how can you possibly bear that sort of weight? I was so surprised reading it through this time at how much more I laughed than I remembered ever laughing in the short story collection. So one of the things that I included. Did I include it or did I cut it at the end? No, it was also from a real Derwan, which was the thing that Buri Ma repeats over and over again, which was, believe me, don't believe me.

[A]

You couldn't even dream. You couldn't even dream this.

[C]

And just the reaction of this silly phrase over and over again. Believe me, don't believe me, you would never have felt sheets as soft as these. Or. I just. It was so. It's funny enough, but it was so surprising to have these moments of levity and humor amid this really very like, heavy short stories that I find quite heavy.

[B]

Yeah, I agree.

[A]

Death, maybe two on the nose. I was gonna leave it to the jury here. Maladies poorly interpreted can't be cured. Too much, too, too much telling. Rebecca, what do you think about that quote?

[B]

I will allow it for Lahiri because it's so well done.

[C]

I'll allow it I'll allow it, but only because it's the title. Only because it's the title of the book.

[A]

I think. Yeah, that almost is too much for me. In order to leave it, I need to go and put a spin on it backwards, which is, isn't this the idea of art or liberal education or science or therapy? Like, I think there's a theory within this that even if you interpret them, they can't be cured. Like, that's. But that's all you can do. Like, okay, it's the naming of the thing. The naming of the thing may not be sufficient, but it's necessary if there is a cure to be found. Rebecca. Hot Take this is only the second greatest title in involving the word maladies.

[B]

Oh, yes, because we get the Emperor of All Maladies from Siddhartha Mukherjee.

[A]

By definition, the Emperor of All Maladies is a superset of the interpreter valleys.

[B]

Someday, when we're ready for another 500 page nonfiction on this podcast, we will do Emperor of All Maladies.

[A]

One more here. This is bridging off lore a little bit. Like, there's sort of two kinds of people in the world. The people that are excited and delighted by little things and the people that don't get it. So she was like that, excited and delighted by little things, crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream or dropping a letter in a mailbox. It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate or see. And in that story, I don't. He does not get converted to see the little wonders and see why it's delightful to keep the stuff. But he's willing to play along or to follow in her footsteps on, like, I think it's more hopeful. That's a hopeful story at the end. Rebecca.

[B]

Yeah, I think it's, you know, the common narrative that we talk about in long relationships is, like, the things that you thought were cute at the beginning maybe start to annoy you later in the relationship. And I think the inverse happens here, where he finds himself annoyed by Twinkle and, like, confounded by this ability that she has to engage with a sense of wonder and sort of childlike vibe, a really childlike vibe. And then he comes around to having affection for it and to seeing it as, like, a skill that he lacks and that maybe there's. Maybe there's some wisdom in the way that Twinkle is engaging with life that he didn't get it. And so he was ready to Brush it off. But there's actually some real power there. It's a kind of Dharma. I thought about Dharma and Greg, which is a reference that dates me.

[A]

Wow, that's like the most 90s things you can have possibly said. Okay, go for it.

[B]

It's the time period that this book is coming out. Like, yeah, for the kids, Dharma and Greg was an old sitcom where he's an uptight lawyer and she's a free spirited hippie. And like it's the differences between them that create all the tension, but also all the magic. And I think maybe Sanjeev and Twinkle are headed in that direction as closer to a Dharma than a Greg in a relationship with a, you know, pretty serious finance guy, I think. I don't know. I'll just. Justice for Twinkle was really satisfying justice.

[A]

I think Twinkle does fine. I think everyone who reads this book loves Twinkle.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

If you're a Twinkle hater, find a new podcast. I guess related this for you. If maybe not. I think we've done all the for you we can doing. I'm not sure there's anything else to say unless we want to double score on double underscore one of I think

[B]

if you've if you like short stories, but somehow how you have never read Jhumpa Lahiri just like run, do not walk to these. Just go do it. Don't wait.

[A]

Maybe not Rebecca, if you really need

[B]

a tidy ending to things like a lot of these are ambiguous. There is not much resolution. As Laura was saying earlier, if you prefer a plot, you're not going to get a whole lot of plot here. There's more dwelling in moments of things. And then Laura, I like your note here that if you'd rather avoid, avoid big messy feelings, especially around loss and grief and we've talked about a lot of the sources of those in the stories, then this is maybe not for you, but if you are open at all to the experience of a short story collection, this can be transcendent. Spring just slid into your DMs. Grab that boho. Look for that rooftop dinner, those sandals that can keep up with you. And hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up spring calling Ross. Work your magic.

[A]

The immortal questions are asked. Here are the ones we have developed so far. Laura, I'm going to throw to you. You're going to have the honor of picking which ones you think are primary. You can pick up to three. Okay, ready? Here we go. I'm going to read them all and then you can come back to me. What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Free will. Free will. Yes or no, Laura, where does your heart eye wander?

[B]

I'm so glad that I don't have to answer this question.

[C]

The one that stands out to me most, I think, is, what do I owe my neighbor?

[A]

I was really, especially for those two India stories. Those, like, jump screaming off the page to me for those.

[C]

I think that that's really there. And. And, yeah, I think also. Is this all there is? You know, so many of these stories, and not, like, in a metaphysical sense necessarily, kind of just in a very literal sense where so many of these stories that are featuring people who have moved, immigrated to the United States are mostly saying, like, wait, but what, like, is this. There's a real sense of loneliness or of loss or a sense of misplaced or unmet expectations around kind of move that I think we see there. And then I think, ooh, I want to put in what is the good light? I think in terms of the way that we've been talking this whole time about attention and noticing and curiosity, that that's not. Questions about. And routinely, Lahiri rejects the idea of careers or money or jobs or fulfillment in material sense, and instead asks us to relocate the good life as a pattern of mental and spiritual and psychic habits.

[A]

So if the good life is best represented, I think, by Twinkle, I wonder, what's the negative exemplar for the bad?

[C]

Dev, obviously. Dev.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

Well, I mean, I think obviously, and probably.

[A]

Probably the. The people. The couple that excised BB from their home.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Mrs. Das. The Doss family does not fare well either.

[B]

They don't either.

[A]

Yeah. It's so casually cruelly indifferent that it's hard to. It's like, beyond good and evil. It's like, existentially beige, the existence they're

[B]

looking at that time.

[C]

Speaking of Dev, we did not talk about that short story, which we don't have to now. Sexy.

[B]

Sexy.

[C]

But not for Nothing is her most anthologized short story. There's something about that that is.

[A]

That's my least favorite. Is that my hot take?

[C]

Oh, is it?

[A]

I thought the sexy is. I think sexy meaning someone you don't fall in love with someone. No. Is like, too much. That's, like, too. For American Beauty. You know, that's a kind of. You know, that was too much for

[B]

me, maybe it's the most anthologized because it's the most relatable or approachable.

[C]

I think the structure is really neat as well. I think it's a really nice maybe, but I think it's nice to talk about structurally. I mean, I think there's. We can do it in office hours. I think there's a lot to be said about the structure of the. This collection together, but I think it's telling that Sexy falls right in the middle of the collection.

[A]

Yeah, right in the middle. Oh, I. I do love looking at right in the middle.

[C]

Maybe. Maybe in office hours. I'm going to start talking about chiastic structures.

[A]

Maybe in office hours. Oh, yeah. Laura, say hyp slowly. I'm recording. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing? No. Rebecca, do you want to start?

[C]

I mean, yeah.

[B]

Interpreter. The word interpreter. The idea of interpreter does a lot of work here, not just in the title story, but through the whole collection. Like, we get characters making sense of themselves, making sense of each other, kind of, to borrow from the title story, kind of diagnosing themselves and each other. And then behind it all is Jhumpa Lahiri sort of presenting their cases. Like there's a way of reading these stories, and that's almost like Lahiri as the doctor taking you on grand rounds of looking at the different patients and what is their malady? What is their malaise? What. Like, what. What ails them? It's absolutely about art and writing just a million percent.

[A]

Laura, you've already done the curiosity thing, but you also noticed that, like, actual characters are translators, storytellers, etc.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, Interpreter is right there for us with. With Mr. Kapasi. But there's. There's. There's storytellers here. Like, that's what I love about the Buri Ma story, in particular, that I think we can think about that story as how storytellers are treated and how the. I mean, part of the. Believe me, don't believe me, is like, at some point it stopped mattering whether this was true or not, because it was so persuasive and it was so compelling and so interesting. And so I love that story as an apology for storytelling.

[A]

Yeah. Could you get the most from just watching the signal adaptation? There is not one of this, though. She has had other things interpreted. And apparently there is an another. Not another. There is a Netflix series of Unaccustomed Earth that has been shot already, according to. So I don't know if that will actually happen. Who knows if that's how direct that is, but we have not. Ironically, this one, which is the most famous and the best selling, is the one that hasn't been adapted into any. Anything as of yet, as far as I can tell.

[B]

Like, it's been in adaptation purgatory. There was an Indian director named Amitav Kaul who was shooting an adaptation of it in 2014, but it never came to pass. And Laurie, you have a note here that it maybe speaks to the weirdness of short story collections. Like, nobody really knows what to do with these when you're.

[A]

You have to Black Mirror it. Like, this was like the MFA for Black Mirror, like an anthology series. I think that's the only way to do that because that's. Laura, you said we do the movie. Musical. Musical TV series or Muppets. I think the TV series is really the only way to do this.

[C]

Yeah. And I think, I think, you know, I find it. I mentioned like the anthology series that I just don't think are tonally right. Like Black Mirror is not it. Or even like the same idea. But then I started thinking about other ones, like, well, White Lotus. Then I thought, you know what, though? I would love to see the Doss family in White Lotus. And I actually have that much of a mental reframing to like, imagine the Mike White version of that story, which is not the story that is that interested necessarily in the wistful interpretation of it, but in the let's show this woman or this family, but especially this woman who is really taking advantage and really kind of operating with this deeply colonial mindset and the way she's moving through the world. So, Mike White, if you're listening, I love this reading.

[B]

If you were looking for White Lotus Season 5, let's do it.

[A]

Do you remember there was a whole run of New York I love you, Parish Atem and then got bastardized into like Valentine's Day or whatever of a bunch of. Of. Of essentially short stories that were then recut into like feature length films. Almost like love, actually. Frankly, though, I think those are a little bit more mixed. Is there a version of that where you pick four or five of these and interleave them in a way that builds to something greater than each one

[B]

could be individual because so many of them are set in and around Boston. You could do sort of the greater Interpreter of Maladies universe where these stories happen, but maybe the characters are weaving in and around each other in their communities and there's like a light point of connection. But we spend one episode with Mrs. Sen. And one episode reflecting on the family where Mr. Pirzada came to dine. Like there might be a way to put some netting, like some connective tissue around it that you could do something like that.

[A]

I guess I'll wrap up this and say, I don't want this because the, these stories are such a creature of the form. I agree to get them out of the form. I don't think. What are we doing here? Why, why are we bothering with this? I don't care.

[B]

Yeah, let's just.

[C]

I think Lahiri is also so, like, whatever the opposite of very online is that I, I, I just want things to say as these nicely, like, quickly composing forms. Yeah.

[B]

I had this in the notes a little higher and I didn't get to it. But the writer, Megan Mac, Hugh Bergman, who's also a great writer of short stories, talks about the analog mind and writers who now in 2026, you read them and you're like, wow, how are they still holding on to the pre Internet mind? But Lahiri dropping into These stories from 1999 reminded me what it felt like to read then and what it feels like now. To read something that was written before the Internet rotted all of our brains is just really mad magical. And I want to, I want to hold on to that. Yeah, let's not, let's not adapt these, okay?

[A]

We're running long. We're gonna skip miscellaneous because we don't have anything great except for a bunch of stuff Laura could say, which is too much. Laura, you're too good for this. I don't want to do a disservice there. Yeah. Office hours, which, you know, cocktail hour could be, you know, after dark, hot takes. Oh, yeah.

[C]

I want, I want a short story revival. I desperately want a short story revival. I thought for a little while I might do a year where I read nothing but short story collections. And I can't do that because I like novels too much. But I want them to stay in the world. I believe they need to stay in the world. I wish that they received more attention than they did.

[A]

And how would this work, Laura? Because I'm here with you for this, but I. The next sentence I have a hard time articulating.

[B]

Like, how do you kick off the revival?

[A]

What is the tent? What are the preachers doing?

[B]

Our literary culture is shining.

[A]

We used to be smart, Rebecca. One of those.

[B]

We did. We used to be smarter. I mean, it could be as easy as one of the big book clubs or a couple of the big book Clubs select collections of short stories because these just tend to. If they get attention, they get long listed for the National Book Award. That's where a short story collection is likely to go. Unless you're Jhumpa Lahiri and you go win the Pulitzer. But if I don't. If Jenna or Oprah or somebody was like, hey, short stories. They're not actually scared, but they're not gonna.

[A]

Matt, it's not gonna work, though. The same thing will happen. Because my hot take here is that TikTok happens before we have to liberate the short story from the short story collection. I think the short story is fine. I think the short story collection. What's holding us back here? Cause no one knows how to talk about it. But could we. You know, we've seen these. Like, Madeline Miller published a short story essentially in like a $12 little hardback thing. Like, could we. How can we make this individual short story into an atomic unit of consumption, understanding, and engagement? The short story collection has been a millstone around our neck for 40 years on this.

[C]

I mean, I'm just seeing left and right, though. Everyone want. Including on this podcast. Everyone wants shorter novels, right? We want shorter novels. This is great. We want the shorter things. We want the novellas and ever. I was just watching a thing on Instagram that Patrick Radden Keefe was being interviewed on, and he was talking about how much he loves Claire Keegan and how much we just want to see more of these things.

[A]

Right.

[C]

It feels to me, if we're moving shorter, and I would love to see that to return to the novella form, why not move even shorter? Right? And perhaps you're right.

[A]

There you go.

[C]

That the collection itself is a weird mix of two things that are trying to do something that is not working.

[A]

That's right.

[C]

So maybe it's just the short story, but either way, I want the short story to continue to exist for the purpose that it has served and hopefully will continue to serve in American literature.

[A]

Yeah. Okay. Rebecca, how about you?

[B]

Oh, I got to mine already. I mentioned earlier the huge gap between the commercial success of the book and the number of people who have at least taken the time to rate it on Goodreads. Makes me concerned that not enough of these 15 million copies have been been read. But just get out there and do it.

[A]

My hot take is twofold and they're not related. Come back to us, JL Come back to us.

[B]

We need more. More. Lahiri.

[A]

Yeah. I miss. I miss. I missed what she was doing. I don't need her to do similar things, but like wrote Italian, trans writing in Italian, then translating into English and I don't know, I'm glad she's having

[B]

fun out there, but I miss her too.

[A]

She's back in the States. I'd be curious to see if she.

[C]

I mean, this is too much. We're running long and I'm really sorry, but I think that she, she's spoken about this a lot as well, is that there is so much pressure on her to kind of be the prototypical immigrant writer. Right. To kind of be the representative of Indian Americans to be the representative of immigrants in the United States. And she's, she's talked about all of the pressure that she feels through the kind of essentializing mechanisms around American literature, meanwhile, has also felt that sort of, of pressure from her family in India as well to kind of represent. And she's talked about writing in Italian as this only place where she can be just truly herself and truly just focus on her own writing and her own voice without that sort of noise. And so I would like Jhumpa Lahiri back, but I would also like the conditions that would enable her to come back. Well, to change like that is what I would see that someone can be a writer without having to be a capital I immigrant writer without having to be a capital I, a Indian American writer. But that Jhumpa Lahiri can just be Jhumpa Lahiri for what she is and for what she's capable of doing on the page.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a nice way of threading the needle, Laura, where I don't need her to do exactly what she was doing. But I am finding myself distanced from this sort of literary walkabout thing that seems to be this sojourn into Rome and Italian literature where she's looking for. For something very specific internally. But I find it hard to connect with this, you know, a fan, an adherent here. I was thinking about this. This would be a whole other podcast episode. But if there is a canon of American immigrant literature, does this make the cut? If not, I'm not going to get into this here, but I think you could very easily include it.

[B]

Absolutely does.

[A]

That may be a good way of going into our read alikes and books inspired by this one. Rebecca, why don't you start there?

[B]

I mean, you can can do some more Lahiri if you like this one. Read Unaccustomed Earth, Read Roman Stories, which I almost skipped because I was kind of like my initial reading.

[A]

Why do I care. It's okay, you can say it. Why do I care?

[B]

Well, no, I will. I'm just gonna. I'll put my own business on Front Street. Like, my initial reading of the. Like, I'm learning Italian, I'm writing in Italian, I'm translating it back to English. Like, the whole thing seemed a little performative or performance art to me. Like, what is Jhumpa Lahiri doing? And I couldn't get excited about it. And then, I trust you, Jeff. So when you were like, no, don't sleep on Jhumpa, I went back and I read it and I do love it.

[A]

She can't be other than herself, which is an awesome writer of short stories.

[B]

Don't miss Jhumpa Lahiri. We both really loved Ghost Roots by Pemi Aguda, came out two years ago, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Really wonderful. And if you want a totally different short story experience, Simon Rich is really funny and Percival Everett does Percival Everett things and can be strange and surprising and kind of feels like a level up in reading skill to me.

[C]

Laurie, you have a ton of recommendations. So if you are interested in other collections that are working in a sort of international tradition or thinking about moving between cultures, I would suggest really Anything by Adweej Danticat. But Crick Crack is really, really wonderful. I'd also suggest Drowned by Junot Diaz, which was his first collection. If you're thinking about the regionalist tradition or other kind of really significant short story collections. You know, Jeff, you were kind of speculating, like, were there other moments? I kind of went backwards and thought about what some of those other moments were. You could again, moving backwards now. Think about 10th of December by George Saunders. Think about now. Now back to like the 80s Shiloh and other Stories by Bobby Ann Mason, which was the short story collection, I think, probably right before, a decade before interpretive maladies that got everyone saying, are we having a short story revival? And like, no, we're not. But I get it.

[B]

It's good. It's a beautiful dream.

[C]

And then Anything by Ann Beatty, I think are. These are really. They're investigating regionalist traditions and regionalist cultures, but also really fascinated with some of the same questions that interest Lahiri

[A]

I had. I went a slightly different direction, but I find myself thinking about Willa Cather when I was reading Lahiri this time. And I don't know why exactly, but I was thinking about my Antonia, which was a chestnut of my educational. Maybe the decades before. I'm not sure they're ripping out My Antonia anymore. But it's also a regionalist story. But it's a story of immigrants. Right. And there's interlocutor Jim Burden seeing Antonia Shmirda and her family. And it's a little more stories from the plains and immigrants on the plains into a novel like form. But I think there's a sympathy there that I wish I had time to go read Catherine My Antonia again. I remember finding it historically boring, like epically boring the first time. Read it at 14. But I read it later in grad school. I was like, oh, I get it. It might be one of those. Rebecca. We put in the break seal when you're 25, like if you can rent a car, you get to read My Antonia and Great Gatsby.

[B]

Like right there with Gatsby.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

15 is the wrong age for both of those.

[A]

15 was a top tough, extremely tough beat, I will say for Mrs. Graham in eighth grade English back in 1993. Cocktail party crypt. Three to five takeaways. Laura.

[C]

Okay, wait, should we save this Mike? I Intro to cocktail party game? Okay.

[A]

Yeah. Save yours. I'm sorry. Savior. Saviors. Savior.

[B]

I mean, I think the real you kind of only really need one takeaway for this and that. It's one of the best and most important short story collections of the 20th century, really, of the modern American fiction era about displacement and identity and connection in the ways that only in the 20th and 21st century could an American story take shape. Laura did introduce a cocktail game that we're going to play in office hours where we will see if the three of us can agree on the best short stories in this collection.

[A]

Well, really only two.

[B]

Why or why not?

[A]

We have one that's Eat this.

[C]

This is a cocktail party game that I should say was given to me, told to me by Jhumpa Lahiri's agent, Eric Simonoff, who I spend a little bit of time writing about my book. So this is a game that I have been dying to play since Laura well introd it to me. So we'll. We'll do that.

[A]

Terrific. All right. Now you could have maybe read the entirety of Interpretive maladies in the length of the show. So we're going to try to keep this quick here for our final beat. A zero to well read score. Each one gets a score of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. I merely read Rebecca rates and I sometimes get to chance to chime in Laura, just to know the dynamic we're working with here. One is historical importance. Two is Readability. Three, current relevance of central questions. Four, book nerd regred in five is oh, damn factor. Laura, do you need us to say anything more about those? You kind of grock it from what's included here. Okay. Historical importance. Rebecca, not ancient. It's hard.

[B]

No.

[A]

Was this lead to anything? How do you deal with historical importance?

[B]

I cede the floor to the representative. What a cop out, Pennsylvania for historical importance? Because she did such a nice job at the top of the show talking to us about what this one means.

[A]

How does one judge an outlier?

[C]

I do study 20th century, so it's hard to. This is kind of like my normal bag of like, what is this important? Because we don't have hindsight. I don't know. I'd put this at like an an 8. Thinking together of both its significance in a larger institutional context, but then also its. Its significance in a canonical context. I think it's more important institutionally in terms of publishing history than I think it is important literarily.

[B]

Okay, okay, I'm on board with that.

[A]

Rebecca, how was this not an Oprah selection?

[B]

It's a great question. Probably because it's a short story collection. Because doesn't Oprah do some stuff with the namesake?

[A]

Listen, she recommended all the Faulkner novels at once, so I can't believe a short story collection was a bridge too far. But anyway, that's a different conversation. Readability.

[B]

It's also the Oprah Book Club. Is. Is young still in 1993? Like, it's only a few years.

[A]

This is 99. This is 99.

[B]

Right. It starts in 94, so it's still young in 99 when this comes out.

[A]

Like not friends. The whole Franzen thing was 2000.

[B]

Oprah didn't hit peak weirdness, though, with like, read all of the Faulkners until, I think after that. So anyway, okay.

[A]

Readability.

[B]

Readability. Readability is high. I think this is an eight, at least. Maybe.

[A]

Why not?

[B]

Yeah, it's. It's a nine. I think it's really excessive.

[A]

The thing that would present it prevented is the plot. Right. Like you need.

[B]

You're looking for.

[A]

You're looking for plot too. I think at the same time and. Well, I mean, we kind of said the same time we need to take a breath between short stories. So I don't know if that's a demerit or a credit to the.

[B]

I don't know that it's either. I think it's just part of it. Yeah.

[A]

Current relevance of central questions.

[B]

10.

[C]

Well, I was trying to think about this book getting published now. And I don't know that Lahiri could publish this book now in quite the same way, which is that she talked about being pigeonholed as the immigrant writer, as the Indian American writer in 1999. I think for this book to be published now in this particular moment, I think that there would probably be an expectation that this book would be a whole lot more about, like, the discrimination that someone from an immigrant community faces about. I mean, certainly like anything after 911 is thinking about immigration in really different ways. And this book is really pre 911 in those ways, in the way that it's thinking about. About immigration.

[B]

That's interesting.

[A]

Well, maybe I can reframe that because maybe the answer would need to be formulated differently, but the question would still be the same, right? Like, the stories that would come out of writing about immigrants maybe would be of different form. But that's this idea of, like, what does it mean to be American? What does it mean to deal with difference? Like, there's a whole bunch of things in there, but we. 8, 9, 10. Somewhere in there we could go, Rebecca, I leave it to you.

[B]

Let's go with a nine.

[A]

It's high book nerd read credit. This is a tough one. Short story collection wins a Pulitzer Prize, but yet everyone bought it. So I don't know, know, it's like, it's like, oh, cool. You like Nirvana?

[C]

I think reading a short story collection immediately gets you to book cred to book. Like, I totally agree of people who actually.

[A]

But it's 200 pages.

[B]

Yeah, let's go. Eight and a half. 8.5.

[A]

Very cool. Oh, damn factor. Laura couldn't breathe. I mean, I don't know what else to say. If you can't. If you read a short story and you have cease functioning, that has to be a 10. I would.

[C]

Because it really doesn't end on the short story, but at its best, I would give it a 10.

[A]

Yeah, we. We only really grade for peaks there, don't we, Rebecca? Like, we don't need the whole thing to be, you know, one step on the moon is enough to justify the Apollo space program. That's fine for us. All right. What else do we want to say? We love this. As you can tell, we have a lot to say. I guess we're going to say some more, apparently in office hours here in a few minutes. Unbelievably. Laura, this was tremendous.

[C]

Thank you so much for having me. Always so wonderful.

[B]

Where can the people find Laura right now?

[C]

As of today, April 28, in bookstores. My book Literary Agents in the Making of American Fiction has come out today. It's got. I've got it right here, it's got a very pretty pink cover and I really love it. But otherwise I am on substack. I write a substack called TextCrunch, which is about book related data. I'm on Instagram, I'm on Blue sky very occasionally. I don't even know that Blue sky is cool enough to like be able to mention it here. It's like saying I'm on LinkedIn, guys.

[A]

Because here we, we are merchants of cool, as you know Laura. So we will arbitrate and dispense coolness according to our whim and interest, Wild Stallion style. By the time you hear this, I will have read and talk to Laura about her book on the Book Riot podcast. So you know I'm gonna be curly headed and shredding guitars of knowledge.

[C]

I'm gonna be expecting you at that point to get back your earlier comment about how how none of us are concerned with craft.

[A]

You wrote. Wait, you. I'm saying we're concerned with craft, but

[C]

we're not crafts people expecting you to eat some crow is all.

[A]

And if you are, you got to show receipts. We expect to see you drafts of your terrible short stories in your inbox tomorrow. If you're really calling me on that.

[B]

But I do want to call out yeah, that episode will be in the Book Riot podcast feed by the time this is landing in Zero to well Read. So if you want to hear more of like the how publishing works stuff, you can head over and hear Laura on the Book Riot podcast.

[A]

The office hours we keep teasing, promising, dreading and looking forward to [e-mail] Jo Twoellred for detailed show notes, free newsletter and the membership options. You can follow us on the socials at zero to well read podcast. Shoot us an email zero to well read bookriot.com doesn't matter what episode it is if it's six months ago, if it was earlier in the run. We are very interested in your own reading journey and your takes and your read alikes and your corrections. My dad texted me the other day hi dad. That the hunters took place during the Korean War. I don't know what we said, but apparently we got it wrong. Rebecca.

[B]

So consider oh that's my bad. Sorry dad.

[A]

Getting at the same time. That's okay dad. And of course thanks to Thriftbook for sponsoring this season of Zero to well Read. And Zero to well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Thanks, everybody.