Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

24:47Because 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 structural jumps. You have to see across character and across location 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? Sure. This collection 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.

25:25There you go. 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 Jean-Luc Nolphe-Sant. But we like to think of it. We Americanists like to think of it as a thing that we've kind of got a lock on and had been really important in the American literary economy up until really the first quarter of the 20th century. But for all of these complicated reasons about copyright and the way that the U.S. 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 a dive, which is pretty much in relationship to things like the birth of the paperback.

26:09So we know how to talk about a short story. And there's a whole big critical apparatus for that. 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 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.

26:44There was no 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.

26:53Jeff:The redheaded stepchild of publishing. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, I spent a ton of time looking at 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 midlist 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.

27:28So even in 1941, I loved this review of Eudora Welty's first short story collection. Publishers Weekly was writing, the book trade 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 Eudora Welty, they're not going to work.

27:55Jeff:And it remains so true that in the book fantasy league, the three of us are in with our colleague Sharifa. 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. 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.

28:36You 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. Wild. 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 Interpreter of Maladies out into the world.

29:11This is what she's facing. And she writes this short 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 oh my god poor thing and so she is recommended another agent who is uh we could talk about him a little bit later but at the time was um not especially established was kind of still still making his name but uh 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.

29:54And 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.

30:03Jeff:So it goes like a short story collection becomes a word of mouth sensation is just a thing that doesn't happen. 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 uh where two of the stories that were published here in um interpreter of maladies end up also being published in the new yorker which is kind of like the holy grail for the writer of stories is publishing something in the new yorker that i mean it's the last one right laura like where else where else can you i mean even now is the new yorker the last bastion of spotlighting a short story pretty much i mean You can publish short stories in Harper's or the Atlantic or Plowshares or wherever you want to go.

30:46Right. The New Yorker pays. The New Yorker. Yeah.

30:48Jeff:I mean, 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. And it matters so much for writers. I mean, you know, Juno Diaz sells Drown basically on the strength of New Yorker short stories.

31:24His 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, Haffey 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.

31:56He'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.

32:24Jeff:This is a murderer's row of other writers. It really is. I know. He knows how to pick them. So not only do we have Jubilee Heery, we also have Sherman Alexie, Michael Chabin, Edwige Danticat, Juno Diaz, Jonathan Franzen, Chang Ray Lee, Jonathan Lethem. 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. Holy cow. I mean, come on. And like the company that that that he assembles here, I was going to say the company that she keeps.

33:02It's hard to imagine a moment when, you know, 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 as the 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 prize and this is for those of you may not know a paperback original is not in hardcover.

33:51This 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. If we think this is going to sell a bunch of books, we put it 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? 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.

34:25This 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 really just a step above the magazine in some ways. It's not that. 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 a hardcover is.

34:50Jeff:Gosh, and it sells. It sells 15 million copies. 15 million copies. That was the last number I have been able to find, but I am sure it has sold four copies since. I wonder how many copies it sells in a week right now. Oh, now? I don't know. Yeah, no idea. I have no idea. It's still on those paperback favorite tables and past award winner tables. I think like a Pulitzer medal on the cover of a book does a lot of work for the rest of its life cycle. But well, then her subsequent books were super popular. So people would then go back and pick that one up. She's still a player. But just I mean, the whole combination of variables here that it's a paperback original, it's a debut collection of short stories.

35:33Jeff:And then it goes on and wins the Pulitzer. Like, as Jeff was saying at the top 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 stories kind of vibe. I really think that there's a case for this is the last time that a true short story collection won the Pulitzer.

36:11Jeff:It's been 25 years. Can I try out this cultural analog on you guys? I was trying to think, 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. 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 yep they generally don't make much money they're made out of passion out of there's great there's great great documentarians, but very rarely do they win the Academy Award or maybe never do they ever get nominated even.

37:03And I was like, okay, what documentary 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, maybe$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 that'd be the closest I could come. If March of the Penguins won the Academy Award, that would be Interpreter of Maladies. How did I do? Can we do any better than that?

37:31Jeff:The first time someone has linked Jhumpa Lahiri and March of the Penguins. You heard it here, folks. So, because I don't really know what else it would be, right? Or, you know, there's nothing really like it. And then the layer on top of that, which is more subjective, is that it's flick being 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, is like the pinnacle of the documentary as a form, which this feels like the end of one version of the short story with a capital S, capital S. Yeah, this is a very fully realized, like a full expression of what a short story can be.

38:09Yeah.

38:09Jeff:Yeah, 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 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 or like jimbal ahiri writes her second short story collection right which debuts in hardcover as a number one new york times bestseller i mean so debuts like it's first week first week out yeah incredible for a short story collection to nobody does that wild and what i think is so useful and and where i think the art analogy does not serve jimpa lahiri very well is um you know this 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 I think about it like popularity and prestige.

39:43She has gotten the popular reader, and she has secured the academic intellectual acclaim as well. 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 Leo, what's your favorite book? And she said, oh, it's Interpreter of Maladies by Jim Belize. Okay, great.

40:03Jeff:There it is. I had moments like that this week where I told a couple friends that this is what I was reading, getting prepared for the show. and both of them, like granted, one of them teaches creative writing, but was like, oh, that book, like everybody just kind of, it's a real readers, like, if you know, you know, kind of book, because I went and looked also, I always check the Goodreads ratings. And for having sold 15 million copies, there's only 200 ,000 Goodreads ratings, which like furthers my suspicion that people buy a lot more short story collections than they actually read. but it might also be that this book predates like, you know, Goodreads being a thing.

40:41Jeff: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 at 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 is a horror story. I can only, I mean, that's where my mind went immediately. I don't want, anyway. I mean, it is what, the 80s here. So yeah, that's a real, that's a real possibility.

41:16Jeff: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 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 coworker whose dad was a poet, and she spent a lot of time with their family.

41:52Jeff: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.

42:33Jeff: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. 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.

43:14Jeff: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 at her most recent collection she writes in italian and then translates into english herself just like maybe the most interesting person i think so the three-hour companion episode about lahiri in italian what she's doing that will be dropping next week you call it in the feed that we're going to do well and she's translating too she translates dominico starnone yes novels as well from italian into english and in my my edition of um interpreter maladies uh starnone writes the the intro for her so she's oh cool 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 i don't know ask we're gonna allow that beckett we'll let him be the arbiter of translating.

44:11Yeah, that's right. 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 you can at this kind of writer's position. 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 has got it. It just happens to be about people falling downstairs in Rome.

44:49But I don't know what to expect. She's returned to the States. She's now teaching. She's the director of creative writing at Barnard. You could tell me whatever her next book is going to be. It could be anything at this point. But I have felt her absence, I think, in American letters over the last couple of decades.

45:07Jeff:Yeah. And I think that's partially because, Laura, 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. Yeah, I mean, I think there's just so that 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. Right. But when I think of people who work primarily in the craft and trade of short story writing, teaching and MFA programs, as they both do, you know, Lahiri is someone who comes to mind and Saunders.

45:48Although 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 I 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 you know having written a short story collection as a part of their mfa program maybe they get to sell it you know they don't want to waste it they want to make something good of it uh and so it might be a second book it might be a part of a two book deal but isn't necessarily the the entree so to speak um or they might be convinced you know take that short story and make a novel out of it.

46:29So 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 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.

47:00Lauren Groff is someone who I think of as 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. 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 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 you know that's why Hemingway and Fitzgerald were getting paid like five thousand dollars per story for the Saturday evening post in 1921 which is an ungodly amount of money today But then before that, Dickens was serialized in newspapers.

47:49It wasn't writing short stories because it was too long to fit in a 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. But so I don't know that the wane, the sun setting, the long, slow graying of the short story as a form is something to be sort of artistically mourned so much as recognize that the form, the places it was made to go into just don't exist anymore.

48:28So of course it doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. I mean, Aleph Bachiman, I think, would agree with you wholeheartedly on that, Jeff. I mean, so she wrote a great piece in M Plus One 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 story collection or 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 us to support them, they just kind of die.

49:10They're not supported or sustained as products. 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 of 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 Louise Erdrich together recently. We read Pema Yagudi last year. It 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.

49:46Can 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. It doesn't matter to me as a reader.

50:14Jeff:All the commercial considerations aside, I understand the practical considerations you're talking about, Laura. 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 like 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. Like Karen Russell is interesting to me as a study in this contrast, like I love her short stories. I think she can do so much in 20 pages.

50:46Jeff:But when she spins out to 400 pages in the antidote, I'm like, we have too much going on. Like you get so much space in a novel that I think you get a little more, like each word has to count for less than it has to count for in a short story collection. And like the degree of difficulty, I think is different and possibly higher. And I just want these writers to get more flowers, I think is what I'm coming down on. Yeah, right. I think Rebecca's on to 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 they like to write them?

51:19Like, does it still work as sort of an artistic and pedagogical moment or not? Well, I think pedagogically, they're really useful because you can talk about the whole thing from start to finish in a class session. So you can talk about a thing's unity in a way that can become really challenging when you take a novel over four class sessions or six class sessions, maybe two weeks on a novel is what I tend to spend. 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.

51:55How did that thing that we talked about five class sessions ago that you might not remember anymore, like how does that affect and inform the way that we think about this ending more? 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.

52:25We often don't get that opportunity in undergraduate classes. And so I think the short story gets us closer to 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. experience yeah and well rebecca and i we came up with short story club together where you don't have book club like this is you 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 you can get your club together everybody reads a temporary matter you have a good cry 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 uh the classroom setting

53:15Jeff:stuff like that 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 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 I don't remember any of that but I remember just the intensity of the...

53:54Your eyes just went into cartoon X's and you just sat there the whole time like trying to recover existential. Yeah, not only at the awe of the craft but just of the ache that you feel finishing this piece was just really haunting so that's been my first encounter and it has stuck with me obviously

54:13Jeff:It's memorable 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. It's the bingo bell. You just got the Jeopardy for$200. I picked this up off of a Barnes & Noble paperback favorites table. I think in like 2002, I was in college. And I'm pretty sure this was the first short story collection that I read on my own in my adult reading life, which 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.

54:56Jeff: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, right. 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. Yeah. It seems so romantic. And I think the first time that I read it, I did think this is the path to healing.

55:24Jeff: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 devastated. Because 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 a reader today would still find it surprising that the turn is that she's leaving. It's a surprising ending. That she's already back or bad. 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.

56:13Jeff:But yeah, I just remember being devastated. 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 didn't have 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.

56:48And I've always had to retranslate back to myself that Temporary Matter is the first story about the lights going out. Interpretive 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. Laura, you are going to kick off with what this is like to read about because you did thing I wouldn't even dare to do in a pod with Rebecca is give a hundred word quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne, or excuse me, Poe about Nathaniel Hawthorne. So I am just going to make space for you here.

57:23How would you like to tackle this long piece you have on Poe? 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. But indeed, there are. 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.

58:01So Edgar Allan Poe, a master of short stories in his 1842 two 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. Do it, girl. All right. So Poe talking about Hawthorne is writing about what a writer of short stories has to do.

58:41Here we go. 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 tends not to the outbring 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.

59:32So 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 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?

1:00:07Like 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 really Hawthorne and Poe set out through their conversation, their literary conversation with each other. Hell of a job there, Laura McGrath. 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 Cispus by Zordel Dill 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.

1:00:57it'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 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 platonic, the poetic po-etic articulation of the short story here.

1:01:39And 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 I can think about.

1:01:46Jeff: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 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 like a novel can do but a short story does it better and a really carefully assembled collection is such a thing of beauty that like 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.

1:02:47Jeff: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. I think that's really talent. And that's a really interesting transition, Rebecca, I think, to talk about something else that you wrote here. so Poe is 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 heeded 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 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.

1:03:45And we're working through it again and again and again and again.

1:03:50Jeff:Yeah, you had a great question in our notes, Laura, about like, 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? I took it one by one. And I think we're on to 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 hors d 'oeuvres or something?

1:04:26Does it actually turn into a coherent menu of some kind? And I'm actually not sure. Some of the flavors seem related, but I almost feel like it's a disservice to each individual story to 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 bites, It's each one of them with complexity and care and subtlety of their own.

1:05:01So 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 was that just like you were too stunned? Like you couldn't even get off the mat after each punch. 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?

1:05:37Like this was - Yes, I totally agree. 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 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 life with two little children is like right now. Sure. Yeah. Well, counterintuitively, I think it actually gives you more space to pay attention than to a longer work, right?

1:06:13Because the tyranny of plot will keep you turning pages, and it allows you to avoid inspection or really considering what's going on beyond the plot. And I like a good plot as much, well, okay, not as much as everyone. But I do like plot sufficiently well. But you can move along and get through it, and there becomes a momentum of reading. And something especially that you really like, you're going to inhale that. 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 by line, sentence by sentence basis.

1:06:46Jeff: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, people, 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.

1:07:28Jeff: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 how long each experience takes. And I I also appreciated that.

1:08:04Jeff: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 its moment. I'm going to 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 J.J. Abrams. We are all over the board today. 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, he's too, he can do whatever.

1:08:38You 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. 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.

1:09:19Could you say more about that? 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 Nefrian antagonist is not particularly strongly felt in most of these but you know and 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.

1:09:58That's not that's not it at all. But, 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. Yeah. One thing she does, if she were a chess player, maybe one of her recurring moves would to isolate a pawn, right? We often get people on their own or in these weird two-person combinations, right? A couple of instances where a kid is in relationship to an adult, like in the Prasada and then the later one with Mrs.

1:10:43Shen, 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.

1:11:19Like 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?

1:11:41Jeff: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 And it's one of the things that makes this book work so well, makes Lahiri's writing so resonant is like, I've had this experience, certainly of being with someone that I know intimately, but being out in a new environment with them.

1:12:24Jeff: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. 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.

1:13:11if I remember my Latin, which was very poor at the same time. And then I found, you have here in the Interprety of Maladies section, or that story, you were locating between Mrs. Das and Mr. Capasi. Like, he becomes infatuated with her, but she doesn't see him or she does, Laura? Like, how were you understanding that relationship between 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. Well, so The Interpreter of Maladies is the key story.

1:13:50It'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 allegorizing her own position as a storyteller, 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 maladies are.

1:14:27So 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 are doing, these people couldn't receive the medical treatment that they need. And Mr. Capasi reflects, well, this is, you know, shameful to my wife. You know, 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 wanted to be a real translator, a literary translator. And now here I'm doing this kind of clerical work.

1:15:00But he sees himself again through this much more noble profession that Mrs. Doss does as it continues. yeah as the story goes on and and mr capasi begins to kind of romanticize this relationship and imagine this future in which he becomes infatuated with mrs das and maybe they have this long distance relationship he starts to see that mrs das is simply romanticizing him exoticizing him as as in fact this person who is not fully human in any way shape or form but it's just this conduit and and receptacle for her own confession here um 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.

1:16:00And so I think that's a really interesting moment where Mrs. Das sees, but is so fundamentally not noticing him. It's 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 for her. 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. It's so interesting because even that realization on his part is not, I don't know, internally motivated.

1:16:37It's more like a thwarting of a dream. Like there goes that dream like from Banshees of Inishirian. Like once he realized she's not seeing him that way. And 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 shit together. Or boy, you know, things aren't really, 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 of it, it's brought about by these other circumstances with, what's her name? The centurion, Mrs.

1:17:12Cook. 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. Croft. I was about to say. Pardon me. Thank you. I was about to say Mrs. Couch because I have that image of her leg. Laura Croft, Tomb Raider. That's Mrs. Couch. That's her name. They're put into proximity together and they sort of rub up against each other. and usually only one of the character realizes something. The spark does not happen on both sides of the flint and the steel. And I think Lahiri is very interested in this, 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?

1:17:53And 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, 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? Well, this is my theory of what short stories do and what they are designed to do, which we can get into.

1:18:27Now we're gonna get it. We've done this an hour and 15 minutes, Laura. You didn't wanna start with your three? short stories? We're getting into some stray thoughts. Let's do it. I think this gets to the big questions that this book is asking of us and whether or not this is like 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 disciplining and directing our attention, right? Implicitly, They're always asking us to think about how we go about doing that.

1:19:02And 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. Sen's, 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 on to 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.

1:19:46And it's her mother talking on the tape and her mother says in this goodbye tape. This is meant to be this thing that is saying goodbye to her. 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 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.

1:20:25And 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 to 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.

1:20:59Still, 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?

1:21:40To 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, like the price of a goat is something that is beyond our wildest imagination.

1:21:57Jeff:Right. 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 your Poe quote. Yeah, that too. Thinking about the whole point of the American space program was for Neil Armstrong's foot to get on the moon. Like that whole apparatus of inventing basically silicon wafers and rocket propulsion and orbital mechanics was just to put someone on 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.

1:22:41So if you just look around, you're gonna see things you can't imagine, but you gotta pay fucking attention to it. Yeah.

1:22:48Jeff:I did not expect to be thinking about Mary Oliver in the conversation. Well, you're always thinking about Mary Oliver. You and Spock. Like Spock would say about Rebecca, she's always thinking about Mary Oliver, so just assume that Mary Oliver's gonna come up. 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. It was, I have to say, I mean, you just were talking about the space program.

1:23:19It 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 like watch those broadcasts and and then to read this as well and um anyway that's neither here nor there but just a fun moment while this was all happening that's

1:23:41Jeff:great should we continue with uh notable quotes then since laura yeah we kind of segged into that does anyone want to have one they want to make sure they shout out i've got one more that i want i mean i love um i just love the way she describes her characters and so i pulled A couple that I really liked from When Mr. Prasada Came to Dine. The narrator of the story says, I was charmed by the faint theatricality of Mr. Prasada'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. I felt like I could picture the man or I would have recognized him on the street.

1:24:17Jeff:And then a description of Bori Ma in A Real Derwan. In fact, the only thing that appeared three-dimensional about Burima was her voice, brittle with sorrows, as tart as curds, and shrill enough to grate meat from a coconut. Just wonderful. It's just wonderful. 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.

1:24:59But I know this is a good version of it.

1:25:00Jeff:You know it when you see it. Yeah. Laura, what else do you have? Oh, man. I actually had picked that Bori Ma one too, but then I saw it. So I didn't include it. But I, oh, I don't know what to stick with. 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 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?

1:25:37I 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 the the thing that burry ma repeats over and over again which was believe me don't believe me you couldn't even dream you couldn't even dream this and and just the repetition 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 i just um yeah it was so it's it's funny enough but it was so surprising to have these moments of levity and humor amid uh this really very like heavy short stories that I find quite heavy.

1:26:19Jeff:Yeah, I agree. Yes, maybe two on the nose. I was going to 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? I will allow it for Lahiri because it's so well done. I'll allow it. I'll allow it. But only because it's the title. Only because it's the title of the book. I think, yeah, that almost is too much for me. I, 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.

1:27:01Like, 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 involving the word maladies.

1:27:17Jeff:Oh, yes, because we get the emperor of all maladies from Siddhartha Mukherjee. By definition, the emperor of all maladies is a superset of the interpreter of maladies. Someday when we're ready for another 500 page nonfiction on this podcast, we will do emperor of all maladies. One more here. This is bridging off Laura a little bit. 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.

1:27:52It 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, 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. Like, I think it's more hopeful. That's a hopeful story at the end, Rebecca.

1:28:11Jeff: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 a skill that he lacks and that 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.

1:28:53Jeff:It's a kind of Dharma. I thought about Dharma and Greg which is a reference that dates me. Wow, that's like the most 90s things you could have possibly said. Okay, go for it. It's the time period this book is coming out. Like, yeah, for the kids, It's Dharma and Greg was an old sitcom where he's an uptight lawyer and she's a free spirited hippie. And 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 pretty serious finance guy. I don't know.

1:29:30Jeff:Just justice for Twinkle was really satisfying. Justice for Twinkle. I think Twinkle does fine. I think everyone who reads this book loves Twinkle. If you're a Twinkle hater, find a new podcast. I guess related to 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 underscore one of these. I just think 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. Don't wait. Maybe not, Rebecca. If you really need a tidy ending to things, like a lot of these are ambiguous.

1:30:06Jeff: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 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. The immortal questions aren't asked. Here are the ones we have developed so far. Laura, I'm going to throw to you.

1:30:38You'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, yes or no? Laura, where does your heart eye wander?

1:31:01Jeff:I'm so glad that I don't have to answer this question. The one that stands out to me most, I think, is what do I owe my neighbor? I was really... Especially for those two India stories. Those like jumps screaming off the page to me for those. Yes, I think that that's really there. 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.

1:31:42And then I think, ooh, I want to put in what is the good life? I think in terms of the way that we've been talking this whole time about attention and noticing and curiosity. 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. So if the good life is best represented, I think, by Twinkle, I wonder what's the negative exemplar for the bad life. Dev. Obviously Dev. Yeah. Dev. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think obviously. And probably the people, the couple that excised Bebe from their home.

1:32:32Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Mrs. Doss, the Doss family does not fare well either.

1:32:37Jeff:They don't either. 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 looking at that time. Existentially beige. Speaking of Dev, we did not talk about that short story, which we don't have to now. Sexy. But not for nothing. It's her most anthologized short story. There's something about that that is... That's my least favorite. Is that my hot take? I don't know. Is it? I thought the sexy is... I think sexy, meaning someone you don't... Falling in love with someone you know is like too much. That's...

1:33:08Too on the nose. Same for American Beauty. You know, that's a kind of... You know, that was too much for me.

1:33:14Jeff:Maybe it's the most anthologized because it's the most relatable or approachable. I think the structure is really neat as well. I think it's a really nice. Maybe too neat. 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 this collection together. But I think it's telling that sexy falls right in the middle of the collection. Right in the middle. Oh, I do love looking at right in the middle. Maybe, maybe in office hours. I'm going to start talking about chiastic structures. Maybe in office hours.

1:33:44Oh, now we're talking. Yeah. Laura, say hypotaxis slowly. I'm recording. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing? Rebecca, do you want to start? I mean, yeah.

1:33:58Jeff: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 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?

1:34:31Jeff:It's absolutely about art and writing just a million percent. Laura, you've already done the curiosity thing, But you also notice that like actual characters are translators, storytellers, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, interpreters right there for us with with Mr. Capasi. But there's there's storytellers here. Like, that's what I love about the Bori Ma story in particular, that that I think we can think about that story as how how storytellers are treated and how how the I mean, part of the believe me, don't believe me is like at some point it's not mattering whether this was true or not, because it was so persuasive and it was so compelling and so interesting.

1:35:08And so I love that story as an apology for storytelling. 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 isn't another, not another, there is a Netflix series of Unaccustomed Earth that has been shot already, according to Wikipedia. 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 anything as of yet, as far as I can tell.

1:35:45Jeff:Like, it's been in adaptation purgatory. There was an Indian director named Amitav Kahl 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 adapting them. 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 where you said we do the movie, musical TV series are Muppets. I think the TV series is really the only way to do that.

1:36:13And 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. Yeah. 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 love this idea. that much of a mental reframing to like imagine the Mike White version of that story right which is not the story that is that interested necessarily in the like wistful interpretation of it but in the like let's show this woman who 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

1:36:57Jeff:if you if you were looking for white lotus season five let's do it do you remember there was a whole run of like new york i love you parish attempt 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 could be individually. Because so many of them are set in and around Boston.

1:37:31Jeff: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. Perzada 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. I guess I'll wrap up this and say, I don't want this because 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?

1:38:05Why are we bothering with this? I don't care. Yeah, let's just not. I think Lahiri is also so, like whatever the opposite of very online is, that I just want these to be gay as these nicely composed regular forms.

1:38:20Jeff:Yeah, I had this in the notes a little higher and I didn't get to it, But the writer Megan Mayhew Bergman, who's also a great writer of short stories, talks about the analog mind and like 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, like dropping into these stories from 1999 reminded me of like what it felt like to read then and what it feels like now to read something that was written before the internet, like rotted all of our brains is just really magical. And I want to hold on to that. yeah let's not let's not adapt these okay we're running long we're gonna skip miscellany 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 cocktail or not cocktail hour i don't want to do you a disservice there yeah office hours which you know cocktail hour could be you know uh after dark hot takes oh yes 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 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 like how do you what what is the tent what are the preachers doing like our our literary culture is like we used to be smart rebecca one of those 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.

1:39:55Jeff:Like, because these just tend to, if they get attention, they get long listed for the National Book Award. Like, that's where a short story collection is likely to go, unless, you know, 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 scary. But they're not going to matter. It's not going to work, though. The same thing will happen because my hot take here is that we need 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 because no one knows how to talk about it.

1:40:29But could we, you know, we've seen these like, Madeline Miller published a short story essentially in like a$12 little hardback thing. Like, 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. I mean, I'm just seeing left and right, though. Everyone wants, 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 I was just watching a thing on Instagram that Patrick Raddenkeith 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.

1:41:11It 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. There you go. That the collection itself is is a weird mix of two things that are trying to do something that is not not working. That's right. 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.

1:41:39Jeff:yeah okay rebecca how about you oh i i got to mine already i mentioned earlier the just the huge gap between the commercial success of the book and the 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 read but just get out there and do it um my hot take is twofold and they're not related come back to us jl come back to us we need more morally yeah i miss i miss i miss what she was doing i don't need her to do similar things but like wrote italian writing in italian then translating into english and i don't know i'm glad she's having fun out there but i think yeah she's back in the states i'd be curious to see if she's i think this is 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.

1:42:40And 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 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 like to see, that someone can be a writer without having to be a capital I immigrant writer, without having to be a capital I 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.

1:43:27Yeah. 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 something very specific internally. But I find it hard to connect with this, you know, a fan and 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.

1:44:00Jeff:It absolutely does. 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? I mean, you 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 why do i care it's okay you can say it why do i well no i will i just like 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 jumpa lahiri doing and i couldn't get excited about it and then i i trust you jeff so when you were like no don't sleep on jumpa i went back and i read it and i do love it she can't be other than herself which is an awesome writer of short stories.

1:44:45Jeff: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. Laura, you have a ton of great 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 Adwige Danticat, but Crick Crack is really, really wonderful.

1:45:22I'd also suggest Drown 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, 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 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?

1:45:57And like, no, we're not. But I get it. It's a good attempt. It's a beautiful dream. And then Anything by Anne Beatty, I think these are really, they're investigating regionalist traditions and regionalist cultures, but also really fascinated with some of the same questions that interests Lahiri? 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 Maya Antonia, which was a chestnut of my educational, maybe the decades before. I'm not sure they're ripping out Maya Antonia anymore.

1:46:30But it's also a regionalist story, but it's a story of immigrants, right? And there's interlocutor Jim Burden seeing Antonia Shmirta 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 Cather and My Antonia again. I remember finding it historically boring, like epically boring the first time I 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 brake seal when you're 25. Like if you can rent a car, you get to read My Antonia and Great Gatsby.

1:47:04Right there with Gatsby.

1:47:06Jeff:15 is the wrong age for both of those books. 15 was a tough, extremely tough beat, I will say, for Mrs. Graham in eighth grade English back in 1993. Cocktail Party Cripsy, three to five takeaways, Laura. Oh, OK, wait, should we save this? Mike, I intro to Cocktail Party game. OK, yeah, save yours. I'm sorry, save yours, save yours, save yours. I mean, I think the real you will 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.

1:47:46Jeff: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. Well, really only two. And this is a cocktail party game that I should say was given to me, told to me by Jim Belahiri's agent, Eric Simonoff. who I spend a little bit of time writing about in my book. So this is a game that I have been dying to play since Eric introed it to me. So we'll do that. Terrific. All right. Now you could have maybe read the entirety of interpretive maladies and the length of the show. So we're going to try to keep this quick here for our final beat is here to well-read score.

1:48:22Each one gets a score of one to 10, with 10 being the highest. I merely read, Rebecca rates, and I sometimes get a chance to time 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 read cred, and five is oh damn factor. Laura, do you need us to say anything more about those? You kind of grok it from what's included here. Okay. Historical importance, Rebecca, not ancient. It's hard. No. Would this lead to anything? How do you deal with historical importance here?

1:48:52Jeff:I cede the floor to the representative. Oh, what a cop out. Okay. 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. How does one judge an outlier? 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 eight thinking together of both its significance in a larger institutional context, but then also 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.

1:49:31okay okay i'm on board with that rebecca how is this not an oprah selection

1:49:37Jeff:that's a great question probably because it's a short story collection because doesn't oprah do some stuff with the namesake 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 it's also the oprah book club is is young still in 1993 like it's only a few years this is 99 this is right it starts in 94 so it's still young in 99 when this comes out like not friends the whole thing was 2000 obama didn't hit peak weirdness though with like read all of the faulkners until i think after that so anyway okay readability readability is high i think this is an eight at least maybe why not higher why not higher yeah it's i it's a nine i think it's really accessible the thing that would presented prevented is the plot right like you need you're looking for plot too i think at the same time and well i mean we kind of said the same time we each need to take a breath between short stories so i don't know if that's a demerit or a credit to the readability i don't know that it's either i think it's just part of it yeah current relevance of central questions 10 well i was trying to think about this book getting published now and i i don't know that lahiri could publish this book now in quite the same way which is that, you know, she talked about being pigeonholed as the immigrant writer, as the Indian American writer in 1999.

1:51:00I 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 some of an immigrant community. Yes. About, I mean, certainly like anything after 9-11 is thinking about immigration in really different ways. And And this book is really pre 9-11 in those ways, in the way that it's thinking about immigration. That's interesting. 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?

1:51:34Like 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 eight, nine, 10, somewhere in there we could go. Rebecca, I leave it to you.

1:51:46Jeff:Let's go with a nine. It's high. Okay. Book nerd read cred. This is a tough one. Short story collections. Win the Pulitzer Prize, but yet everyone bought it. So I don't know. It's like, oh, cool. You like Nirvana? I think reading a short story collection immediately gets you to book nerd. I totally agree. I totally agree. Of people who actually... But it's 200 pages? Yeah. Let's go 8.5. 8.5. Very cool. Oh, damn factor. Laura couldn't breathe. I mean, I don't know what else to say. If you read a short story and you cease functioning, that has to be a 10, I would think. This one's hard because it really does depend on the short story.

1:52:23But at its best, I would give it a 10. It does. At its best. 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. Thank you so much for having me. Always so wonderful.

1:52:48Jeff:Where can the people find you, Laura? As of today, April 28th, in bookstores. My book, Middleman, Literary Agents in the Making of American Fiction, has come out today. 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 Text Crunch, 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 be able to mention it here. It's like saying, I'm on LinkedIn, guys. Because here, we are merchants of cool, as you know, Laura, so we will arbitrate and dispense coolness according to our whim and interest.

1:53:25Wild Stallion style, by the time you hear this, I will have read and talked to Laura about her book on the Book Riot podcast. So, you know, I'm going to be curly-headed and shredding guitars of knowledge about Laura's book. I'm going to be expecting you at that point to get back your earlier comment about how none of us are concerned with craft.

1:53:43you were wait i'm saying we're concerned with people

1:53:51and if you are you got to show receipts we expect to see you the drafts of your terrible short stories are inbox tomorrow if you're really calling me on that but i do want to call out yeah

1:54:01Jeff: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. The office hours we keep teasing, promising, dreading, and looking forward to here at patreon.com slash zero to well read for detailed show notes, free newsletter and the membership options. You can follow us on the socials at zero to well read podcasts, shoot us an email zero to well read at book rat.com doesn't matter what episode it is. If it's six months ago, if it's earlier in the run, we are very interested in your own reading journey, and your takes and your read-alikes and your corrections.

1:54:36My 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, so consider us - Oh, that's my bad. Sorry, dad. We're 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.