Five Snouts up for Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth

(:)(:)(:)(:)(:) for Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of stories by Jhumpa Lahiri (A New York Times Book Review "best book of the year").

Obviously if it's winning this prize from the NYT, many people know about this book, but just to give it my plug. I am not much for short stories. If I like a story, I'm usually upset that it's ending and if I don't like a story, I feel that I've wasted my time and why should I read the next one. So I generally avoid the genre. Every so often a collection comes along that makes me break my general rule (Grace Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute comes to mind). This is such a collection.

I loved every story, but I was not upset to have them end. The endings were so organic that I felt complete, nothing contrived about them. It was if she were simply recording real human moments that happened just so. As the jacket trumpets, she moves the reader from Boston to Seattle to London, focusing on the experience of Bengali transplants to America and their progeny. I found every story fascinating and couldn't wait to get to the next one.

Read this book. Or at least, one story.