Roman Stories
by Jhumpa Lahiri

translated by the author with Todd Portnowitz

Alfred A. Knopf : 10 October 2023 : 224 pp. : 9780593536322

Rome—metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical—is the protagonist, not the setting, of these nine stories: the first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize–winning master of the form since her number one New York Times bestseller Unaccustomed Earth, and a major literary event.

In “The Boundary,” one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker’s daughter, who nurses a wound from her family’s immigrant past. In “P’s Parties,” a Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with foreigners at their friend’s yearly birthday gathering—until the husband crosses a line.

And in “The Steps,” on a public staircase that connects two neighborhoods and the residents who climb up and down it, we see Italy’s capital in all of its social and cultural variegations, filled with the tensions of a changing city: visibility and invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home.

These are splendid, searching stories, written in Jhumpa Lahiri’s adopted language of Italian and seamlessly translated by the author and by Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz. Stories steeped in the moods of Italian master Alberto Moravia and guided, in the concluding tale, by the ineluctable ghost of Dante Alighieri, whose words lead the protagonist toward a new way of life.

Praise for Roman Stories

“Electric . . .  Elegant . . . The fluid transitions between Lahiri’s and Portnowitz’s translations elevate Roman Stories from a grouping of individual tales to a deeply moving whole.” —The New York Times

"Masterful . . . Lahiri brilliantly delineates her characters' triumphs and trials." —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A dazzling collection of nine stories originally written in Italian and featuring characters who grapple with vast emotional and social chasms that cleave the lives of families, longtime friends, and immigrants . . . Throughout, Lahiri’s luminous prose captures a side of Rome often ignored . . . These unembroidered yet potent stories shine.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A brilliant return to the short story form by an author of protean accomplishments . . . Filled with intelligence and sorrow, these sharply drawn glimpses of Roman lives create an impressively unified effect.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“These nine Roman Stories mark a return to Interpreter of Maladies by a person who’s found her homeland in not belonging—in a third language, another language, not inherited but discovered—which she’s chosen as a place to live . . . The stories in this book, with all their clarity and purity, are a pained gesture of truce. There’s a restlessness, yes, but it comes with the acceptance that this restlessness is a homeland . . . Lahiri’s Rome is filled with an aching sense of peacefulness. It’s there before our eyes, beneath a blanket that dims the noise but does not silence it. It’s all there beneath a dust of words, delicate but bold enough to cover the city in its entirety.” —Andrea Bajani, Il manifesto