Book Club: Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

The first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and master of the form since her number one New York Times best seller Unaccustomed Earth. Rome - metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical - is the protagonist, not the setting, of these nine stories. A family vacation in the Roman countryside told through the eyes of the immigrant caretaker's daughter, a friends' party that goes wrong, a public staircase that tells the story of the Italian capital... These are splendid, searching stories, written in Jhumpa Lahiri’s adopted language of Italian and seamlessly translated by the author and by Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz. Stories steeped in the moods of Italian master Alberto Moravia and guided, in the concluding tale, by the ineluctable ghost of Dante Alighieri, whose words lead the protagonist toward a new way of life.