Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Zero to Well Read is sponsored by thriftbooks.com. Today on the show we're talking about Jhumpa Lahiri's interpretableities, a contemporary classic, a modern masterpiece, something that Rebecca and I both love, and we're joined by a special guest. You're going to hear about one of the quirks of this book is a paperback original. So for, I'm not, I sometimes have a collector's heart and sometimes I don't, but I really want this in a paperback if you're getting one of these. Weirdly, the original cover design, it's a little hard to find in the original paperback. I'm not even talking about first edition, but like subsequent reprints, but there is a hard cover that's available in the first edition cover design, orangy, gauzy, huge, with a couple of candles on it. That's the one I really want there. Most of them you're going to find have the winner of the Pulitzer Prize sticker. I think I actually printed on there. If you can find one that doesn't, grab you one of those because that's their super rare. You can browse those and other editions on thriftbooks.com. Thanks to them for sponsoring this episode of Zero to Well-Red. Welcome to Zero to Well-Red, a podcast on everything you need to know about the books you wish you read. I'm Jeff O'Neill. And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. This week, we're delving into our first short story collection, Jhumpa Lahiri's 1999 debut, Interpreter of Maladies. And we have a very special guest joining us. Dr. Laura McGrath is an English professor, literary historian, and data scientist. Listeners of the Book Riot podcast might have heard her over there where she's our regular publishing data correspondent. And her book, Middle Men, Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction is out today as you're hearing this. Laura, thanks for being with us. Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. And I love this podcast so much. It's a delight. We're going to ask Laura why she's here for this book in just a second. Rebecca and Laura ganged up to make this plan. I'm delighted to be a part of it. But before we do that, remind you, you can find the link in the show notes to sign up for our free newsletter. I'm sure Vanessa will cook up all sorts of things. Probably the document here Laura's provided with all kinds of interesting back matter that really matter for a book like this, which is a one of one in so many ways. It is what we're going to talk about as we get into it here. That's at patreon.com slash zero to well read. You have a moment to rate and review the show wherever you're listening. You can always email us at zero to well read a book right.com. You don't have to email us to rate and review that that comma. Rebecca, I just roll right into the email address. Rating reviewing is separate from Ealing is please do both podcasts on Apple Spotify, wherever you get to. We just got included in the essentials for books and Apple Books podcast category, which is very cool. A sign of all of you listening and rating and reviewing and people are finding the new show that way as well. All right, with that, Rebecca or Laura, why interpretor of maladies? We wanted Laura to have come on because the literary agents making American fiction, how these books get made and by whom there's a lot of story here. Is it just that you like this book Laura? Rebecca, did she pitch this to you? How did this happen? We were talking about having her come on zero to well read at some point because Laura's just such a fount of interesting information. It was like, what's a book that you love that you also know some really fun stuff about? And she said, interpretor of maladies. And I said, say no more. I love that book. Let's do it. I think the short story collection generally does not get anywhere near as much love as it should. There's a million reasons why that's the case. But when you look at it from the perspective of a literary agent, it really makes no sense that short story collections continue to exist. And yet they do for a lot of really important reasons. And so interpreter of maladies is not only a really singular achievement of late 20th century publishing, but also just a gorgeous, gorgeous book on the page at the sentence level. It's just such a pleasure to spend time with. So this seems like the very obvious zero to well read choice. I was trying to think about this and looking at my notes and putting some thoughts down and we'll get to you in a second. Like, is this the most prominent short story collection of my lifetime that was published in my lifetime? Rebecca, you have later down in the notes that the last short story collection to win the Pulitzer Prize was a visit from the Goon Squad, which at the moment felt like a bolt of lightning at the time. But also does it really feel like a short story collection? Yeah, that's Jennifer Egan doing Jennifer Egan things. And Laura, as we'll get into this, you have a lot of notes like Lahiri feels like an expression of the short story in a classic tradition. And we could talk about that is or that modern late 20th century tradition as well. And not for nothing. This this book sold, let me check Laura's notes here. Oh, yeah, a bajillion copies, which is sort of one of the reasons that makes it fascinating too, because from a readily point of view, it delivers the goods in a way that, you know, some short story collections can and that like literally everyone who cared about even trying literary fiction at all read this at some point between 1999 and like 2012. So there's a lot there for us at the same time. We'll get into our individual stories here, Rebecca. The synopsis for a short story collection is more difficult, even more difficult than Joy Luck Club, which is linked. What is this book? This is a little tougher. So we'll talk about the themes of the collection. It's nine short stories, just a little under 200 pages, and they span the US and India set mostly in the late 20th century, really about identity, relocation, dislocation, and all of the emotional impact of that. There's a lot of loneliness. There's a lot of longing. There's a lot of the search for community and the kinds of experiences that members of a diaspora, whether it's here, Southeast Asian diaspora, or any other real immigrant community, sort of common experiences there. A lot of the stories explore the immigrant experience in the US, how place is connected to our identity and our relationships, and there are really complex families. There's troubled marriages. And then there's also just the drama of everyday life, which is one of my favorite things about Lahiri, just these small, quiet moments of everyday life and everyday relationships that are so sharply observed and beautifully written. She tells you so much in the first paragraph of a story about who these people are. And Laura, you have a note here about dignifying the ordinary, if you want to say something about that. Yeah. I think the characters that are in this novel, but then also the details that Lahiri leaves us with, have a lot to do with not just the drama of everyday life or showing us that, which is dramatic or curious about everyday life, but finding the beauty and the most mundane household objects in the most mundane life routines and elevating them to the level of the short story through such gorgeous language, I think is really a part of her project here and at the heart of how she is thinking about how these two cultures interact in the lives of these characters who are thinking through, as you said, Rebecca, identity and relocation and dislocation. Yeah. I wondered if, just to give listeners a little more of a taste of what happens in some of these stories, should we each talk about a story that we have some affection for? I know Laura, you and I have the same favorite in this collection, so I'll give you as our special guest. You can start with a temporary matter. This is one of the special short stories. It's not just you guys. I'll type in here. This is one of the special stories. The story that opens the collection, A Temporary Matter, is I think maybe my favorite short story in all of modern English? I mean, it's just a gut punch. So A Temporary Matter is the story of Shoba and Shukumar and they are a married couple living outside of Boston in their mid-30s and they are experiencing a rift in their intimacy. We learn over the course of the novel that they have suffered a great loss, the great loss of their infant who was stillborn and all of the drama around that. Shukumar was not there. He was away at an academic conference and Shoba had to endure the birth of her child and the death of her child alone, but all of this comes to a head. They haven't talked about it and they're experiencing so much independently rather than together. And so this strange circumstance happens where the power is being turned off in their neighborhood for a brief period of time each night and so they have to have dinner together by candlelight every night or sit on their porch in the darkness and they decide to play this game, which is let's tell each other something we've never told anyone. And Shukumar experiences this as a rebirth of the intimacy in their relationship that they start speaking to one another again like they have it for years and they start remembering why they were in love in the first place and rekindling their marriage and at the end Shoba tells him that she's leaving him and he realizes that what he has experienced as a rekindling of intimacy was in fact for her a sunsetting and he responds by telling her what he has never told her, which is that he had the opportunity to hold their baby after he was born and he knows that the baby was born a boy, which is something that Shoba never wanted to know. She didn't want to hold the baby, she didn't want to know anything about it because she wanted to spare herself this grief. And so it is like a slap in the face to learn that Shoba's leaving and then a literal punch to the gut to hear, not just hear this information about the baby, but to hear him convey this to her in this desire to hurt her in this really just, yeah, painful, painful life. So that's a long way of saying this story ends with just this dramatic reveal on several levels and of the two of them crying for what they now knew is I believe have the last sentence ends. And you're just left to sit with that feeling and to dwell in that and there is no resolution and there's nothing that's healed about this relationship and you as the reader are forced to not heal and not resolve with them and to sit in that pain with them, which is a heavy load, a heavy burden, but something that Lahiri does just really, really brilliantly. It's a virtuosic short story. It really is. It's incredible. Go ahead, Jo. Rebecca, I feel like we could do a whole episode on that story like we did for Barbarably. Like there's a lot there because also it strikes me and I'm curious, Rebecca, because I know this is one of your favorites. I'm going to try to tee you up here a little bit, but it also seems like a perfect short story for what we understand a capital S, capital S short story is in a certain kind of way. None of the three of us are craftspeople when it comes to writing, but we have long experience reading literary fiction and a literary fiction of a kind. Maybe best expressed by this single short story, Rebecca. I think so. It's just a whole world in like 15 pages and you're dropped right into the middle of these characters relationship. As Laura was saying, there's no resolution. We don't know what happens to them after the realization that the marriage is ending. They'll presumably go their separate ways, but the reader is left to do a lot of the work and the slow reveal across these pages of what's actually going on here because Shukumar, like it's told in third person, but Shukumar is kind of our point of view character that the lights go down and she suggests, let's tell each other something we've never shared before and he does experiencing experience that as like it's exciting and it feels like this new door opens in their relationship. And then it turns out that actually like she's been doing something else. But what we want from litter what I want from literary fiction is a window into like here's a human experience that you haven't seen articulated in this way before. And Lahiri does it so concisely in each of these stories. But I think the real wonder of a temporary matter is like the story itself is temporary. There are all of these little things peppered throughout like the these rolling brownouts are also temporary. This is only going to happen for a couple of nights. And she also drops all of these little sort of breadcrumbs of other things like they have to use birthday candles the first night in because they don't have real ones yet. So that too is temporary. And she's just doing like, I mean, it's kind of hard. This is what we talk about when we talk about short stories like that there's a fully realized set of characters in a fully realized world and a moment that you drop right into that sort of emotional experience of it. Some weird inciting factor that this one seems banal, right? This fact that the power company said we're going to cut off your power from these particular nights. So that's well within the purview of sort of normal existence. Maybe you guys have lived through this. Our water is going to be out for a while. We're doing construction and that disrupts their routine just enough for them to do something a little bit different. There's a caricature version of this lore that is, you know, these are heterosexual heterosexual knowledge workers in their 20s, talking about how they don't talk to each other and there was an abortion, I'm leaving you. But but it's not but it's not cliche at the same time or it is. I'm kind of wrestling with what she does that I don't know elevates it out of the course. I guess I have a kid apart of like a short story that one might badly write at the age of 25 or 26. I mean, there's a lot to say about this short story specifically. There's a lot to say about the form of the capital S capital S short story that I think Lahiri is really tapping into. But what I love about this one and what I think Lahiri is really invested in here is the the intention with which Shukumar notices and is curious about his wife. And perhaps that that curiosity has waned over a period of time. But the the details that he notices about her like about how she sits and crosses her ankles when she sits and the way that she can anticipate certain things and recipes and stocks their their their pantry just so I mean there's not only a sense of the intimacy that's there but a real sense of you know Lahiri understanding that that love or or attention here requires curiosity. And I think that that's something that we see consistently throughout these stories. Love in all of its varieties is is something that motivates renewed and focused attention something that that motivates curiosity. And I think really her harshest judgments I think she's a very compassionate writer just through and through but I think her harshest judgments are reserved for those people who are fundamentally uncurious. And I think that's something that's really beautiful in this one. 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Just visit 11reader.com that's E-L-E-V-E-N-R-E-A-D-E-R.com. Thanks again to 11 Reader for sponsoring this episode. I love that point and it kind of takes me into the story I was going to talk about for this section after a temporary matter. One that I don't remember loving on my past readings of it but that really stood out to me this time is this blessed house about a young couple, they're Indian, they buy a house in like the Boston suburbs and they start discovering like Christian paraphernalia all over the place. There's like little statues of Jesus and Mary. There's a big poster somewhere. She finds a I think a big statue of the Virgin Mary hidden behind some shrubbery in their yard and the wife Twinkle is delighted by all of this. She's like how kooky. Like these people, like they must have been super Christian and they had all this stuff but also they left it and what are they doing having left it and she wants to like display these weird figurines and like display everything and he's horrified in a real what will people think way and they have this tension in their relationship around it. They're throwing a big party like all of this is happening in the run up to a big housewarming party where his colleagues are going to come. They're going to meet her for the first time. They've gotten married by their their parents have arranged the marriage and he's been a lonely bachelor for a long time. He finally has a partner. He doesn't have to spend his days in loneliness anymore but he does not know what to do with this woman and her name being Twinkle is I think such a great clue from Lahiri about like what her vibe is like. She has this real sense of like childlike whimsy that could be wonderful but that he is really like he annoyed by and doesn't know what to do with it and he's kind of embarrassed of her I think in the run up to the party but like she's going to leave those figurines out and they have the party and through the course of that night he sees other people seeing her and starts to be able as as Laura you were talking about the noticing of details he starts to be able to notice her in a new way because he's seeing other people see and appreciate her like she's the life of this event she takes everybody on a scavenger hunt up into the attic where they find something even more ridiculous and he I think starts to have this shift in perspective of what his expectations were his desire to make the right impression on people or to shape their life around what other people will think you can start to see that the door cracks open for him into like I'm going to have a whole different kind of life because of how this woman is and and my reading of it at least this time around was like kind of like he decides to let her cook like we're gonna we'll keep the statues they're a little ridiculous but that's maybe a virtue it's a feature not a bug of her and Lahiri is observing of just all of those little moments and like he moves her shoes so that she won't come down from the attic and trip on them and then has this moment of tenderness again looking at the shoes and thinking about her slipping her feet back into them and how they're going to get in bed that night and talk to each other about the party just I just loved it and I don't remember like ever really paying that much attention to this one in the past I love that story too that was one that I had marked I I hope what he talked about I mean I think there's a way that that twinkle that character could have also been a sort of you know manic pixie dream girl type yeah and and Lahiri just does not let that happen you know in the same way that Shukumar I understand that this you know in a temporary matter this is a two-sided relationship but I'm you know I feel very deeply for Shoba in that story but she doesn't allow us to to paint Shukumar as a villain right and and in in this blessed house too it's it's Ranjeev I believe is the husband Sanjeev is in yes thanks yeah he's not allowed to be a villain here either right there's there's a compassion that she writes into her characters and really demands of us as readers as well that I think is just it's it's it makes these stories such a pleasure to read I think but also it's it asks quite a lot and and it's it has high expectations for for the readers as well yeah Jeff what did you love I mean the ones you said I guess I'm going to put a little English on this and like what is the one that I couldn't figure out how to figure out a little bit and for me that's the one in the middle a real derwan there's two of these that are set in India and this is where Bori Mahu is a refugee and has become a de facto door person for this Calcutta apartment building is accused of theft loses her position and they get marginalized and sort of pushed out of the building right and I wasn't really sure what to do with in fact I'm not really sure to do with both of the stories that are completely set in India because the B. B. Haldur story is not dissimilar about there's this woman who's literally living on the fringe the balconies and the the basements both of these women are living at the edge of this little society this little culture but they work in opposite directions right one gets pushed out the other one gets reincorporated where the community I don't want to summarize it too much but they essentially force out the family that was rejecting her and then she like a hermit crab takes their space right literally and figuratively takes their space assumes their business has a child mysteriously by by man unknown and seems to cure this series of epileptic fits is that what you guys were understanding we're never giving a real diagnosis here and for something which is so obviously about diagnosing illness this is the one real illness we get and it's presented as this puzzle box that is cured by being integrated into society in some way like was that a successful version was at a counterpoint to a real derwan so those are the two I found myself looking at and when I first read this this is the first time I've read the complete short story collection since I first read the whole thing I think Rebecca and I think talked about interpretable melodies and some of the other ones but like thinking of it as a whole I hadn't really looked at structurally and so I'd noticed that I was starting to notice the arrangement right like you can see you can see the ending story the third and final continent as a response to a temporary matter at the beginning right those are this is a coming together rather than a rending much like the first India story is a rending and the second India story is a coming together so I was kind of looking at is is there anything to say across stories because this is a point Laura has like what the hell do we do about talking about a short story collection how do you do this because you do not have the tendrils of character or plot or tension or whatever that go through a novel you really have to make these I don't know these these structural jumps we have to see across character and across location to try to try to make that so I was doing a little bit more of that and I find that a very pleasurable if frustrating process at the same time okay uh Laura why don't you lead off our why it's important section here sure this collection isn't is important for a number of reasons I talk about it in my book for a number of reasons but I think what's useful to know to just give some background into what a short story collection is there 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 me but we like to think of it we Americanists like to think of it as a thing that we've kind of got got a lock on and had been really important in the American literary economy up until really the the first quarter of the 20th century but for all of these complicated reasons about copyright and the way that the US publishing industry developed it was really short stories printed in magazines that were the money makers driving the American literary economy up until the mass market magazine kind of begins to take take a dive which is pretty much in relationship to things like the birth of the paperback so we know how to talk about a short story and and there's a whole big critical apparatus for that and we can talk about that in a bit but the short story collection is this very weird form where it takes these things that are otherwise considered to be disposable right printed on newsprint in magazines that are meant to be consumed once in one sitting read it and then throw it away or recycle it or line your bird cage or whatever and it makes them a little bit more permanent by like putting a cover on them by binding them by making them something that stays on your shelf that you can collect but they've never sold well there was no like glory day of the short story collection they have always just been these very weird things that no one entirely knows what to do with the redheaded stepchild of publishing exactly exactly and you know i spent a ton of time looking at like archives of trade journals and things and i think one truism or one you know very clear fact if you study publishing history is like there was no good old days like there was never a point where publishers thought you know what the mid-list going strong like no it has always been bad and the industry kind of thrives on that that sort of lore but the same thing was true with the short story i assumed when i first started researching it that the collection had a heyday along with the short story itself but it didn't so even in 1941 i loved this review of udorah 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 you do it well to either not going to work and it remains so true that in the book fantasy league the three of us are in with our colleague syrifa if you if one of your books is a collection of short stories and it notches like a you know 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 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 lehue you know the short story collection serves several interesting functions you know maybe a writer worked on it in the mfa program but the agent might suggest to them you know just hold on to it until you're a well-known novelist maybe we'll go out with it in a two book deal we'll just kind of hang on to it later or expand the short stories into a novel because the debut short story collection is just a very challenging thing to sell in fact only 1.2 percent of books acquired each year are debut short story collections wild that is the the smallest possible slice of the fiction pie so this is where we're going right this is the condition that lehue puts interpretive maladies out into the world this is what she's facing um and she writes this story story collection um we can talk a little bit i know rebecca you've got a lot to say about jimba lehue uh and 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 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 and was kind of being known as someone who was a champion of the form and with basically zero publicity this is a paperback original was not released in hardback it becomes this word of mouth sensation after it was published 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 lehue has this wonderful coup uh where two of the stories that were published here in um interpreter of malady's end up also being published in the new yorker which is kind of like the holy grail for the writer of stories is is publishing something in the new yorker that i mean it's the last one right lora like where else where else can you get a 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 harpers or the atlantic or plow shares or wherever you want to go right the new yorker pays the new yorker yeah i mean this is the pace i heard george thonder's given 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 then 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 dino diaz sells drown basically on the strength of new yorker short stories his agent nicole iraji had sent the book out and was kind of getting bites whatever but then i think it was how to day a black girl brown girl hafi comes out in the new yorker and iraji is able to go back and tell everyone look what this new yorker story just came out and drown becomes the the mega sensation that it is right that really boosts the sale here that didn't happen for lehiri 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 um the editor the fiction editor at the time was bill buford he's putting out in 1999 the fiction issue where he anoints the writers who he believes from the standpoint of 1999 are going to be the writers to watch in the 21st century and these are the people that we're going to be reading and talking about and they're going to matter and lehiri 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 uh we need to give it to bill buford for a moment this is a murderer's row of other writers i know he knows how to pick them so uh not only do we have jubilee hiri also have sherman aleksie michael chaban adwidge danta cat juno dias jonathan franzin chang ray lee jonathan lethem i'm not done george saunders david foster wallace i mean this is like i i don't you could teach and people do this is a contemporary american literature class starts 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 like the company that that that he assembles here i was going to say the company that she keeps it'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 her for those of you may not know a paperback original is not in hardcover like this happens from time to time and it's hard to really articulate what it means laura but it's essentially like we don't think this is a giant commercial winner necessarily like if we think there's going to sell a bunch of books we put in hardcover so we can get those sweet sweet dollars but it's also sort of a signal of something else and it's a little hard to articulate laura what how do you understand what a paperback original really is signifying i mean i think a paperback original well i mean i i can say more of what a hardcover would be signifying right not only is the their higher price point and so publishers stand to make more money off of it but also is signifying something about the staying power of the writer right like this is a collector's item now this is something that you want to put in your library this is something that you'll want to hang on to and that you should have in this first edition it might somehow be valuable eventually a paperback original is like really just a step above the magazine in some ways right it's it's not that like i don't want to totally neg paperback originals but it's not doing the same sort of work for writers prestige um as as a hardcover is 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'm sure it has four copies since uh i want copies it sells in a week right now oh now yeah no i mean it's still it's still on those paperback favorite tables and past award winner tables i think like a politzer medal on the cover of a book does a lot of work for the rest of it's yeah 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 in incredible the whole the combination of variables here that it's a paperback original it's a debut collection of short stories and then it goes on and wins the politzer 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 politzer 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 politzer in 2000 the next time a short a so called short story collection won the politzer was 2011 with a visit from the goon squad which is more of like a novel in stories linked short stories kind of vibe like i really think that there's a case for this is the last time that a true short story collection won the politzer it's been 25 years yeah i try out this cultural analog on you guys to let me i was trying to think like what is the equivalent of this in some other media mode i was like okay so laura was saying we still publish short story collection we don't acquire many of them and even the ones that we do we probably shouldn't because they're going to lose money anyway like even that we do 1.2% is probably still a money losing effort on those but people do it for artistic reasons for you know getting in on someone's career early kinds of reasons and also there's a prestige and sort of a feeling of like this is in the furtherance of the literary tradition to cultivate the short stories cultivate young writers in this regard i was thinking in movies it's sort of the equivalent of documentaries right yep they generally don't make much money they're made out of passion out of there's great there's great documentarians but very rarely do they win the academy award or maybe never do they ever get a nominated even and i was like okay what documentary what like blew out expectations that everyone sort of heard about and the only one i could come up with the march of the penguins you guys probably remember this made 133 million dollars but it's like if march of the penguin then went on to win the academy award for best picture like i can't quite finish the analogy because there's nothing like it but but that'd be the closest i could come if march of the penguins won the academy award that would be interpretive ballads how did i do can we do any better than that the first time someone has linked jumpa liheary 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 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 is a family movie but it's also not i don't think among documentaries like the pinnacle of the documentary as a form which this feels like the end of one version of the short story with a capital s capital s this is a very fully realized like a full expression of what a short story can be yeah 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 uh 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 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 jibba liheary writes her second short story collection right which debuts in hard cover as a number one new york times bestseller i mean so debuts like it's first week first week out that's number one incredible for a short story collection too nobody does that and what i think is so useful and and where i think the art analogy does not serve jimba liheary 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 think about it like popularly prestige like she has gotten the popular reader and she has secured the the academic intellectual acclaim as well like i my daughter's preschool teacher and i were talking um a few years ago when my daughter was in preschool and i just asked like oh well teacher liya what's your favorite book uh and and she said oh it's interpretive melodies by jimbo liheary okay great there it is i hadn't i had moments like that this week where i told you know a couple friends that this is what i was reading getting it 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 reader's 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 that they actually read but might also be that this book predates like you know goodreads being a thing let's talk a little bit about liheary because she's also just fascinating she was born in london her parents are bengali immigrants but the family moves to cambridge massachusetts when liheary 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 the anyway i mean it is what the 80s here so yes right yeah that's a real that's a real possibility but she won a school contest and so she got to have the book published and put in the school library and this is like where she gets the bug but 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 um so she's just a child who's really invested in arts and creative expression from the get go gets a degree at 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 co-worker whose dad was a poet and she spent a lot of time with their family and that's when she really started writing so she starts writing short stories in 1997 which is two years before this book comes out like incredibly short gap from the time she starts writing to the time she becomes one of the goats a temporary matter which is that story that opens the collection that we were talking about at the top of the show is the first short story she wrote as a book at all as an adult like which could be the pinnacle of a writer's career and this is the first thing she writes just like a truly monumental also just this woman loves education and learning she has so many degrees she's got advanced degrees from boston university she has an m a in english an mfa in creative writing she has an m a in comparative lit and a phd in renaissance studies but she publishes this collection in 1990 or the collection is 1999 the story interpreter of malady is was published in 1998 it was included in best american short stories and it won the oh 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 on a custom to earth as well which is that short story collection that comes out number one in hardcover and now she's also doing this like head spinning thing with italian where for the last like decade or so she's been at least some of the time living in italy she's become fluent in italian she starts writing in italian and then roman stories at her most recent collection she writes in italian and then translates into english herself just like maybe the most interesting person working today the three hour companion episode about lehiri and italian what she's doing that will be dropping next week you call the burden and the feed that we're going to and she's translating so interesting she translates de menico star no nana yes novels as well from italian into english and in my my edition of interpretable d's star no nana 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 the assamual becket we'll let him be the arbiter of translating yeah that's right so some real pierandello shit going on with that particular moment there so she with the lowland right in 2013 she kind of exits stage right from commercial publishing she's reached the highest heights ironically after a book called the lowland she can sell really she can sell as many as she you can at this kind of writers positions movies have been made i don't know man she wrote this little book about book covers that i read and completely mystified me roman stories we both really liked rebecca i read it first i said she stills got it it just happens to be about people falling downstairs in roam but i don't know what to expect she's returned to the states she's now teaching um she has the she's the director of creating right 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 decades 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 lehiri is one of them so i i want you to say a little bit more about that yeah i mean i i think there's just so that that's kind of my point i mean i think there's so few writers who who quote make a living as short story writers the only other person i can think of other than junpa lehiri is george saunders um as someone who writes principally short stories i mean of course saunders has his two novels lehiri has her novels too right um but when i think of people who work primarily in the craft and and trade of short story writing teaching in mfa programs as they both do you know lehiri is someone who comes to mind and and saunders although i think lehiri now i maybe i'm wrong about this but i think most of her day-to-day work is probably translation um more than it is is short story writing and i if if dr lehiri would like to talk to me about that i would love to hear um but there's there's just so few writers that are actually doing that partly that's because they're not commercial forms so we see writers moved 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 the 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 so one of the short stories that i look at in my book is war years by viettuan win and and uh it was the first book that his agent or first short story that his agent nat sobell read and sobell reached out to win 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 as you take the short story and you make it into a novel some people work like equally in both forms lauren groff is someone who i think of as 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 um and so it kind of falls out of the the repertoire for most writers i think i think too the 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 hemmingway and fitzjel we're 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 like dickens was serialized in newspapers right it wasn't writing short stories because it was too long to fit into newspaper but you could do a bunch of serials and then really before that you just had books so even something like the cannerberry tales or donkey hote 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 all these other printing techniques or markets for it so i don't know that the the wane the sunsetting that 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 which made to go into just don't exist anymore so of course it doesn't exist anymore yeah i mean a live batching on i think would agree with you wholeheartedly on that jeff i mean so she wrote a great piece in n 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 collect 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 story and workshop it over and over and over again but without a publishing apparatus that a media apparatus to support them they just kind of die they they're they're they're they're not supported or sustained as as products but can we together push back on that in this regard because i think rebecca wants to do this too is just because it was created out of a largely commercial form i think what we discovered sort of we the collective we have whomever that reads these things like oh this form is cool it does special things and even if it doesn't sell our own reaction to temporary matter and like you know we've read short stories by louis airdrick together recently we read pemegoodie last year goes like this is part of our diet there's specialness to a short story that even if it doesn't sell maybe worth sort of i don't know can 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 we how can we because just because it was commercially inspired and that it's commercial i don't know what 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 yeah i think to me as a reader like all the commercial considerations aside and like i understand the practical considerations you're talking about laura like 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 you know do a writer's workshop it might be the 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 caron 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 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 the degree of difficulty i think is different and possibly higher and i just want these writers to get more flowers i think is well let me ask you this laura yeah right i think rebecca's on to something there like it's been a while since i've taught a short story how are students responding to short stories do they like to read them do they like to write them like 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 right so you can talk about a thing's unity in a way that can become really challenging when you take a novel over you know four class sessions or or six class sessions maybe two weeks on a novel is what i tend to spend right so it might be really hard to talk about both how the last you know quarter of the novel concluded and then also to then do that sort of um gymnastics work with the class to then say all right well now let's talk about how all of this gets kind of unified for us as readers how did that thing that we talked about five class sessions ago that you might not remember anymore like how does that happen and inform the way that we think about this ending where 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 um and so you can have those conversations about unity really up front and that can foreground the the critical conversation which is really i mean if you think about work as a literary critic as a book critic you're beginning from that point right you don't begin writing until you finish the whole thing we often don't get that opportunity in in undergraduate classes and so i think the short story gets us closer to what um 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 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 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 stuff like i think that's a nice way to go into our next section here about how we first encountered these because laura you first encountered jubilee hiri in a classroom i did i did in my contemporary lit class in college i read a temporary matter it was anthologized in 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 uh and we read a temporary matter and i just remember that that feeling of of like the air has gone out of me after i finished this thing and i don't remember our conversation i don't remember what my professor did with it like i i don't remember any of that but i i remember just the the intensity of the your 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 the awe of the craft but just of the the ache that you that you feel finishing this this piece was just um it's really haunting so that's that's been my first encounter and it has stuck with me obviously 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 bring the bingo bell it's the bingo bell for two hundred dollars i picked this up off of a barnes and oboe paperback favorites table i think in like 2002 i was in college and i i'm pretty sure this was the first short story collection that i read on my own in my adult reading life which kind of fits with the rest of the story about where this book sits in publishing and how it became so visible and my husband and i had like been dating for a year i loved him i think i knew on some level or i was starting to know that this is maybe the person i wanted to be with and i remember a temporary matter hitting me about like first it seems so romantic that they're like they're sitting in the dark and they're finding their way back to each other and they're revealing these things and then it's just like that gut punch of like oh my god right i'll ask you both this here when you said that rebecca were you i was having an echo memory that the first time i was reading it assuming they were going to reconnect at the end of that story yeah because of this yes yeah it seems so romantic and i think the first time that i read it i did think this is the path to healing like i didn't know if she would give us resolution at the end but i did not see the real ending coming and i just remembered well yeah because our modern internet theory speak of like therapy speak is you connect with people you speak honestly and that is the road to eldorado that is the road to healing to reconnection and to sort of mutual understanding that's durable this suggests that the opening up was a shutting down i think even i think a reader today would still find it surprising that the turn is that she's leaving it's a surprising ending and that he realizes that she has been this is what she's been doing for the past three nights like that the point was never to reconnect but that she's been trying to like work herself up to be to have the guts to say the thing but yeah i just remember being devastated 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 canada 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 and that particular purchase and i read it and i remember being blown away though i was confused from the very beginning i thought interpretive maladies was the name of the first story not temporary matter and i've always had to re translate back to myself that a 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 uh 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 like to read about because you did a 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 po about nathaniel hawthorne so i am just going to make space for you here how would you like to how would you like to tackle this long piece you have on po all right all right i want to talk about what a capital s s 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 ed grail and po which there are worse places to start in american literature period but indeed there are um if we're talking about the history of the short story this is this is kind of where we need to think uh and how we need to think about this in the united states so ed grail and po a master of short stories in his 1842 review of nathaniel hawthorne's twice told tales so we are this is deep cuts po 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 in um creative writing workshops and in um undergraduate workshops as well so i i guess i will just read ed grail and po do it girl all right so po talking about hawthorne is writing about what a writer of short stories has to do here 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 tend not to the out bringing 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 director indirect is not to the one pre-established design and by such means with such care and skill a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art a sense of the fullest satisfaction so what we take from this is is po'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 like a temporary matter is one of them i feel this way at the end of third and final continent i feel this way at the end of the treatment of bb heldar as well but but leheri really has has made these sort of gem-like stories in in this achievement of this kind of principal aesthetic effect in this tradition that that really hawthorne and po set out through their conversation their literary conversation with each other hell of a job there laura that's a great pull i mean and if you read some like bar to be the scrivener which we talked about on this or the gilded cispus by zordledon herston or hills like white elephants they all the ones that sort of survive and i think what laura is suggesting here that's a chicken and egg sort of situation the ones that survive do the thing because they do the thing we say the ones that survive do in that particular way it's really fascinating to see and it's it's fascinating to me that po 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 in grocket that would be preferable to even having read 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 the show that one effect that even they have to go through this linearly where you can't see the end at the beginning is a frustration to the platonic what's not even the poetic po dash eddick articulation of the short story here and it's not you don't get this in other kinds of writing generally speaking i guess the closest might be a kind of a poem in a way but that's a close i think it's a really great analogy actually like the way that i feel when i have finished reading a good poem is similar in power to how i feel at the end of a great short story that like there is this singular effect i'm so grateful laura that you pulled this quote because now i feel like i have vocabulary for this response i have to short stories that i'd never quite been able to articulate before so i also snaps to po for doing that for us um 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 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 tell it and that's a really interesting transition rebecca i think to talk about something else that you wrote here so po was reviewing twice told tales but this is a statement about the singular short story right this is not a statement about the story collection it is this is what it means to read a story and actually lots of scholars have have heated on this this question of the poetry as well that that it's um not poetry broadly but the lyric and uh my poet friends have recently uh let me know that that is no longer a fashionable way of thinking about what lyric poetry does but at least for a while short stories were thought to resemble the lyric but you know what leheri manages to do is you've written here rebecca is achieve this effect not just the one time but nine times um and and we're working through it again and again and again and again 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 do you how did you approach the collection i took it one by one and i think we're on to something here there 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 do it does something emerge from those nine amuse bouches or or or durves or something this actually turn into a coherent menu of some kind and i'm not actually not sure like they some of them some of the flavors seem related but i almost feel like it's a disservice to each individual story that then have to yoke it to the others in order to achieve some other meaning so taking a 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 each one of them with complexity and care and subtlety of of their own so i did read them individually because i wanted to give it space to like sit with it for a minute laura i mean did you have did you do that intentionally or is that just like you were too stunned like you couldn't even get off the mat after each punch i sometimes i just couldn't read them read another one afterward i was really affected this time around by mr prosotta came to that 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 i like and one of my hot takes here is i actually think the short story is like the cure to our attention ailments right like this was yes 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 um and so i read them one at a time mostly just by necessity in terms of what what life with two little children is like right now yeah well counter intuitively i think it actually gives you more space to pay attention than to a longer work right because there is the 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 right and i like a good plot as as much well okay not as much as everyone but i do like plot sufficiently well but you know you can move along and get through it and there becomes the momentum of reading and something especially that you really like you you're going to inhale that right they're going to get more of those pages and the velocity of page intake works against you know doing something else on a line i think there's a sense basis there's a 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 um 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 right podcast you were like i just don't know how to get into short stories and it's like but you could read a 500 page novel like i don't understand um that complexity but i guess to quote lizzo like with with lehire especially the short story is not a snack at all baby it's the whole damn meal like 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 lehire is really consistent here with how long each experience takes and i i also appreciated that like i had some great coffee moments with these like you did laura and some great end of the day time and i just i didn't want to like plow through it i just wanted to give each one 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 track the movie reboot written and directed by jg abrams we are all over the board today there 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 there's he can do whatever you don't know you don't know what he's going to do and spock says something like he can only be who he is so whatever he's going to do is going to come from his essential character and if we know something about him we may be able to divine that he is going to surprise us so be on the look i always think about they are who they are and lehire this book feels if each individual story doesn't resist or i am resisting trying to draw direct parallels i feel lehire's nests in all of them and laura i think i think you had something underlined about her compassion for her characters that maybe is the thing that feels most like lehire her own humanity her own character her own sensibility seeping through could you say more about that yeah i i mean i i think i mostly said what i wanted to say about this at the top but i just don't know it's really hard to find a villain amongst these stories and and maybe that's also because these story short stories generally speaking but these resist real plots and so the need for an antagonist is not particularly strongly felt in most of these but you know and even those stories where you see people behaving very badly they're there's still a sense of um i don't know compassion or tenderness i think that lehire has toward them of not necessarily like recuperating everyone like um you know understanding like everyone's villain origin story like that that's not that's not it at all but um right 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 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 do like isolate upon right we often get people on their own or in these weird two-person combinations right you know a couple of instances where a kid is in relationship to an adult like in the the prasada and then the later one with mrs shen we get people who are now married or have been married for a while in a new apartment in a new building like she has a few moves that she goes to back and forth because i think what she's trying to do is hold for a moment someone in a particular frame of mind or frame of existence and then sort of seeing what that actually means and what happens to them or seeing someone else often having a realization about someone else is something that she does over and over again so in terms of ideas i'm not sure that's as interesting to me to look across the stories as looking at her particular sort of chess moves like she likes to do this right she likes to put this person in this situation and then sort of see what happens in those particular kinds of things and that's something you have here rebecca like seeing through each other's eyes it's very rare that we get like a classic epiphany from someone and now i realize that this life was what we get something else rebecca what do we get instead of 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 right and that as you're saying jeff like that is one of lehires moves this comes up over and over but i think that's also really true and really human and it's one of the things that makes this book work so well makes lehires writing so resonant is like i have had this experience certainly of being with someone that i know intimately but being out in a new environment with them maybe you're at a work event with a friend and you've never seen them in that mode before and now you get to see them engaging and how other people respond to them and there's 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 just so masterful yeah because you were used the word before laura curiosity but it almost feels more fundamental 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 i think is actually the latin word of curiosity comes from care and attention if i think of if i remember my latin which was very poor at the same time and then she i i found you have here in the interpretive malady's section or that story you are locating between mrs. das and mr. kapasi like he becomes infatuated with her but she doesn't return she doesn't see him or she does laura like how are you understanding that relationship between 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 right but maybe you could have followed me well so the interpretive malady's is the the key story it's the title story of the collection which i think is always if we think about a theory of a collection or a way of theorizing what a collection is i think that's a good place to turn and it'd be useful to talk about moments where we see particularly in this story laheri kind of allegorizing her own position as a storyteller right which i think we see happening here but you know so mr. kapasi explains that one of his other jobs is interpreting in a doctor's office so because there are so many different languages and dialects in the region of india where he lives and he speaks many of them he works in a regional doctor's office and can help patients communicate fully to doctors you know based on whatever their their malady's are um so that way they can be treated and mrs. das says oh this is so romantic they're so dependent on you if not for you if not for this noble good work that you were doing these people couldn't receive the medical treatment that they need and and mr. kapasi reflects well this is you know shameful to my wife you know it's it's demonstrating that i don't have a job that i make enough money that i 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 but he sees himself again through this much more noble profession that mrs. das does as it continues yeah as the story goes on and and mr. kapasi 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 and kapatious 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 is his for the taking and his for the capturing you know to put on his slideshow for vacation when he comes home and so i think that's a really interesting moment where mrs. das sees but is so fundamentally not noticing him 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 and and he's not willing to play the particular part that she's cast him in uh 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 and who he is it's so interesting because even that realization in his part is not i don't know internally motivated it's more like a thwarting of an i a dream like there goes that dream like from banshees of an isheer and like once he realized he's not she's not seeing him that way and so meant so many of these little realizations that people have are foisted upon them by circumstance they're not like boy i really should get my shit together or boy you know things aren't really i you know maybe i need to go take a yoga class or maybe i should write my mom or something like this it's very much you know with twinkle or at the end at the end of it's it's brought about by these other circumstances uh with what's her name the centurion uh mrs cook is that her name the landlord at the end of the book damn it i can't remember a character's name to save my life but like he only so many times mrs someone is i was about to say thank you let me say mrs couch because i have that word for like leg laura croft tomb raider um they're put into proximity together and they sort of rub up against each other and one usually only one of the character real realizes something yeah this is the spark does not happen on both sides of the flint and the steel and it's i think lehiri's very interested in this like how do you see your life how do you get to a place where you can see your own life in some sort of way where you could do something about it like existentially and then how then do you reengage a life you feel you're living at a remove of some kind and i think that's the trailing smoke over most of these short stories is like how if not if you don't do it like this how does one do it right if you're 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 okay now now we're gonna get it we've done this an hour and 15 minutes lora you didn't want to start with short stories we're getting into some straight thoughts let's do it all right all right let's do the big questions that that this book is asking of us and and and whether or not this is like actually secretly all about art i mean so i gave you my hot but i think that short stories are our 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 and i think that there's a there's two quotes that i i put here in the doc that i want to draw us to one is um from mrs sen's which is a really lovely story and mrs sen is a woman who is immigrated to the united states her family all lives in india and she becomes a babysitter oh no did i know it's there okay so she becomes a babysitter and 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 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 nanny in times and it's her mother talking on the tape and her mother says um in this goodbye tape right this is meant to be this thing that is saying goodbye to her the price of ghost rose to two or sorry the price of a goat rose two rupees the mangoes at the market are not very sweet college street is flooded and then mrs sen continues these are the things that happened the day i left india and on the one hand there's like nothing remarkable about this really at all it's simply a snapshot and a capture of what life was like at any given time of what her mother's day-to-day life is like and that is intimacy right like that's what a relationship is more than it is any of these particular dynamics or particular events that happen and so then in in the third and final continent which is the story that ends the collection i think we begin to see lehiri directing us to these patterns of attention where the goat rose two rupees or the mangoes aren't very sweet um where 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 has dealt with whereas his son who's a first-generation american has not had to deal with um and he says i know my achievement is quite ordinary i'm not the only man to seek his fortune far from home and certainly i'm not the first still there are times i am bewildered by each mile i have traveled each meal i have eaten each person i have known each room in which i have slept and here i think is is the the kicker as ordinary as it all appears there are times when it is beyond my imagination and that that moment to me made me think of the 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 um and and that seems to me to be what a short story is asking of us right to set aside plot or what it feels like to move through the sensation of experience of things happening and instead to 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 right okay can i build on that laura because i 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 of your poll quote thinking about the whole point of the american space program was for neil armstrong's foot to stand to get on the moon like that whole apparatus of inventing basically silicon wafers and rocket propulsion and orbal manics 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 so if you just look around you're going to see things you can't imagine but you got to pay fucking attention to it yeah i did not expect to be thinking about mary oliver in the conversation oh well you're always thinking about mary oliver you and spa like like spock would say about rebecca she's always thinking about mary oliver so just assume that mary oliver's but like i'm mary oliver attention is the beginning of devotion like there is something really present in lehary'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 it was very kind of emotional too to read third and final continent as i'm also watching stuff from the artemists yeah uh right pass over 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 great should we continue with the notable quotes then since laura yeah we kind of sagged into that does anyone want to have one they want to make sure they shout out i've got one more that one yeah i mean i love um i just love the way she describes her characters and so i polled one that i a couple that i really liked from when mr prosata came to dine the the narrator of the story says i was charmed by the faint theatricality of mr prosata's rotund elegance and flattered by the superb ease of his gestures which made me feel for an instant like a stranger in my own home just i felt like i could picture the man or i would have recognized him on the street and then a description of buri ma in a real derwan in fact the only thing that appeared three dimensional about buri ma was her voice brittle with sorrows as tart as curds and shrill enough to grate meat from a coconut like just wonderful it's just wonderful it's also one of those things that done badly really badly where you get that three descriptions of various you know are they all they're not brittle tart shrill with a metaphor besides them there's a real bad versions of this in short story mfa programs and undergrad writing all over the place and it's it's hard it's hard i find it hard to articulate the difference between a good version of it and a bad version of it but i know this is the good version of it you know it when you see it yeah laura oh man i i actually had picked that buri ma one too but then i saw it i didn't okay include it but i oh i don't know what 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 um 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 um god this is so awful and heavy and we're talking about the death of a child and how can you possibly bear that sort of weight i was so surprised reading it through this time at how much more i laughed than i remembered ever laughing in the short story collection so one of the things that i included did i include it or did i cut it at the end no it was also from a real derwan which was the the the thing that buri 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 reputation of this silly phrase over and over again believe me don't believe me you would never have felt sheets as soft as these or i just 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 uh like heavy short stories that i find quite heavy yeah i agree yes maybe two on the nose i was going to leave it to the jury here malady's 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 lehiri because it's so well done i'll allow it i'll allow it but only because it's the title my only because it's the title of the book i think yeah that almost is too much for me i 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 like that's but that's all you can do like okay it's the naming of the thing the naming of the thing may not be sufficient but it's necessary if there is a cure to be found uh rebecca hot take this is only the second greatest title in involving the word malady's oh yes because we get the emperor of all malady's from siddhartha mocharshi by definition the emperor of all malady's is a super set of the interpreter about these uh someday when we're ready for another 500 page non-fiction on this podcast we will do and improve all malady's um one more here this is bridging off lora a little bit like there's sort of two kinds of people in the world the people that are excited and delighted by little things and the people that don't get it so she was like that excited and delighted by little things crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event like tasting a new flavor of ice cream or dropping a letter in a mailbox it was a quality he did not understand it made him feel stupid as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate or see and in that story i don't he does not get converted to see the little wonders and see why it's delightful to keep the stuff but he's willing to play along or to follow in her footsteps like i think it's more hopeful that's a hopeful story at the end rebecca 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 just seeing it as like a skill that he lacks and that maybe there's maybe there's some wisdom in the way that twinkle is engaging with life that he didn't get it and so he was ready to brush it off but there's actually some real power there it's a kind of dharma i thought about dharma and greg which is a reference that's me wow that's like the most 90s things you could have possibly said okay it's the time this book is coming out like yeah for the kids dharma and greg was an old sitcom where he's an uptight lawyer and she's a free spirited hippie and like it's the differences between them that create all the tension but also all the magic and i think maybe sanjeev and twinkle are headed in that direction as closer to a dharma than a greg in a relationship with a you know pretty serious finance guy i think i don't know i'll just justice for twinkle was really satisfying justice for i think twinkle does fine i think everyone who reads this book loves twinkle yeah 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 score double underscore one of i mean i just think if you if you like short stories but somehow you have never read jumpa la hiri 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 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 and 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 are asked here the ones we have developed so far laura i'm going to throw to you you're going to have the honor of picking which ones you think are primary you can pick up to three okay ready here we go i'm going to read them all and then you can come back to me what is the good life what do i owe my neighbor how do i know what i know is this all there is how to deal with a certainty of death what else might there be what's the deal with good and evil free will free will yes or no laura where does your heart i wonder 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 jump screaming off the page to me for this yes i think that that's really there and and and yeah i think also is this all there is you know so many of these stories and not like in a metaphysical sense necessarily kind of just in a very literal sense where so many of these stories that are featuring people who have moved ever graded to the united states are are mostly saying like wait but what like is this there's a real sense of loneliness or or of loss or a sense of misplaced or or unmet expectations around kind of move that that i think we see there and then i think ooh i want to put in what is the good life i think i think in terms of the way that we've been talking this whole time about attention and noticing and curiosity uh that that's not questions about and and routinely lehiri rejects the idea of of um careers or money or jobs or or fulfillment in material sense and instead asks us to relocate the good life as a pattern of 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 dev obviously dev yeah dev yeah well i mean i think obviously and probably probably the the people the couple that excised bb from there yeah yeah yeah i mean mrs dos the dos family does not fare well either um they don't either yeah it's so casually cruelly and different that it's hard to it's like beyond good and evil it's like existentially beige the existence they're at that time we did not talk about that short story which we don't have to now sexy but not for nothing is her most anthologized short story there's something about that that is that's my least favorite is that my hot take oh is it i thought the sexy is i think sexy meaning someone you don't falling over someone know is like too much that's like two american beauty you know that's what that's a kind of you know that was too much for me maybe it's the most anthologized because it's the most relatable or approachable it's i i think the structure is really neat as well um 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 i do love looking at right in the middle that's maybe maybe in office hours i'm gonna start talking about he asked maybe in office hours oh yeah lower say hypertaxis slowly i'm recording are we sure this is about art and writing no rebecca do you want to start i mean yeah 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 june plahiri sort of presenting their cases like there's a way of reading these stories that's almost like lehiri as the doctor taking you on grand rounds of looking at the different patients and what is their malady what is their malaise what like what what ails them it's absolutely about art and writing just a million percent uh laura you've already done the curiosity thing but you also notice that like actual characters are translators storytellers etc yeah yeah i mean interpreter is right there for us with with mr. kipassi but there's there's storytellers here like that's what i love about the borima story in particular that that i think we can think about that story as how how storytellers are treated and and how how the i mean i 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 right uh i i love that story as a an apology for uh for storytelling yeah could you get the most from just to watching the signal adaptation there is not one of this though she has had other things interpreted and apparently there is another not another there is a netflix series of unaccustomed earth that's has been shot already according to oh 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 like it's been an adaptation purgatory there was an indian director named amitav khal who was shooting an adaptation of it in 2014 but it never came to pass and laura 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 at black mirror it like this was like the mfa for black mirror like an anthology series i think that's the only way to do that because that's laura you said we do the movie musical tv series or muppets i think the tv series is really the only way to yeah and i think i think that you know i find it i i mentioned like the anthology series that i just don't think are totally 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 dos 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 um really taking advantage and really kind of operating with this deeply colonial mindset in the way she's moving through the world so mike white if you're listening i love this reading if you if you're 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 perish 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 link 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 you could do sort of the greater uh interpreter of malady's universe where these stories happen but maybe the characters are weaving in and around each other uh 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 prosata came to dine like i 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 him out of the form i don't think what are we doing here why why are we bothering with this i don't care yeah let's just i think lehiri is also so like whatever the opposite of very online is that i i i just want to say as these nicely quickly composed yeah and forms yeah i had this in the notes a little higher and i didn't get to it but um the writer meghan 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 lehiri like dropping into these stories from 1999 reminded me 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 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 this service there yeah obvious hours which you know cocktail hour could be you know uh after dark hot takes oh yes i 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 revive what what what what is the tense what are the preachers doing like our our literary culture yeah is is like we used to be smart rebecca 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 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 your jubilee herry 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 they're not gonna matt it's not gonna work though the same thing will happen because my hot takey here is that we need to liberate we have to liberate the short story from the short story collection i think the short story is fine i think the short story collection what's holding us back here because no one knows how to talk about it but but could we you know we've seen these like madeline miller published a short story essentially in like a 12 dollar little hardback thing like could we how can we make this individual short story into an atomic unit of consumption understanding and engagement the short story collection has been a millstone around our neck for 40 years on this we have to see 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 everyone i was just watching a thing on instagram that patrick ratinkief 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 right it feels to me if we're moving shorter and i i would love to see that to return to the novella form why not move even shorter right and 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 and hopefully will continue to serve in american literature yeah okay rebecca how about you hot oh i i got to mine already i mentioned earlier the 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 more leary yeah i miss i miss i miss what she was doing i don't need her to do similar things but like wrote italian trans writing in italian and trans breaking into english and i don't know i'm glad she's having fun out there but i miss her too yeah she's back in the states i'd be curious to see if she's what you 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 and she's she's talked about all of the pressure that she feels through the kind of essentializing mechanisms around american literature meanwhile has also felt that sort of pressure from her family in in india as well to kind of represent and and she's talked about writing in italian as this only place where she can be just truly herself uh and truly just focus on her own writing and her own voice without that sort of noise and so i would like jubilee hiri 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 a indian american writer but that jubilee hiri can just be jubilee hiri for what she is and for what she's capable of doing on the page mm-hmm yeah i mean i think that's a nice way of threading the needle allora 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 roam 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 minute here and 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 yeah i'm not going to get into this here but i think you could very easily include it absolutely does that may be a good way of going into our read-a-likes and books inspired by this one rebecca why don't you start there i i mean you can do some more lehiri if you like this one read on a custom earth read roman stories which i almost skipped uh because i was kind of like my initial read why do i care it's okay you can say it why do i know i will i'm just gonna i'll put my own business on front street like my initial reading of the like i'm learning italian i'm writing in italian i'm translating it back to english like the whole thing seemed a little performative or performance art to me like what is jumpa lehiri 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 jumba 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 don't miss jumpa lehiri um we both really loved ghost roots by pennie aguda um came out two years ago was a finalist for the national book award really wonderful um and if you want a totally different short story experience simon rich is really funny and persoval everett does persoval everett things and can be strange and surprising and kind of feels like a level up in reading skill to me and laura you have a ton of i do 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 adwidge danticat but crick crack is really really wonderful um i'd also suggest drown by juno dias which was his first collection if you're thinking about the regionalist tradition or other kind of really significant short story collections you know jeff you were kind of speculating like were there other moments i kind of went backwards and thought about what some of those other moments were you could again moving backwards now think about 10th of december by george saunders think about now now back to like the 80s shiloh and other stories by bobby n mason uh which was the the short story collection i think probably right before a decade before interpretive maladies that got everyone saying are we having a short story revival and like no we're not but i get it it's good it's good it's beautiful dream and then anything by anything by ambe i think are these are really they're they're investigating regionalist traditions and regionalist cultures but also really fascinated with with some of the same questions that interest lehary i had i went a slightly different direction but i find myself thinking about willa kather when i was reading lehary this time and i don't know why exactly but i was thinking about my antinua which was a chestnut of my educational maybe the decades before i'm not sure they're ripping out my antinua anymore but it's also a regionalist story but it's a story of immigrants right and there's interlocutor jim burton seeing antonia schmirda and her family and it's a little more stories from the planes and immigrants on the planes into a novel like form but i think there's a sympathy there that i wish i had time to go read kather and my antinua again i remember finding it historically boring like epically boring the first time right at 14 but i read it later in grad school i was like oh i get it it might be one of those rebecca we put in the break seal when you're 25 like if you can rent a car you get to read my antinua and great gatsby right there with gatsby yeah 15 is the wrong age for both of those 15 was a tough an extremely tough beat i will say for mrs. graham in eighth grade english back in 1993 cocktail party cribsby three to five takeaways laura oh okay wait should we save this mic i'm i intro to cocktail party day okay yeah saviors i'm sorry saviors saviors 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 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 and well really only two like we have one that's this is a cocktail party game that i should say was given to me told to me by jimpley herey's agent eric simonoff who i spend a little bit of time writing about my book so this is a game that i have been dying to play since nice plurah laura well i introed it to me so we'll we'll do that terrific all right now you could have maybe read the entirety of interpretable these in 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 each one gets a score of one to ten with ten being the highest i merely read rebecca rates and i sometimes get to chance of time in laura just to know the dynamical working with here one is historical importance two is readability three current relevance of central questions four book nerd read cred in 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 was this lead to anything how do you deal with historical importance here i ced the floor to the representative 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 i mean what this one means how does one judge i do i do study 20th century so it's hard to this is kind of like my normal bag of like what is this important because we don't have hindsight i don't know i'd put this at like an an eight thinking together of both its significance in a larger institutional context but then also its its significance in a canonical context i think it's more important institutionally in terms of publishing history than i think it is important literally okay i'm on board with that rebecca how is this not an oprah selection that's a great question probably because it's a short story collection because doesn't opera do some stuff with the namesake listen she recommended all the falkner 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 opera 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 and the whole friends thing was 2000 over didn't hit peak weirdness though with like read all of the falkner's 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 yeah it's it's a nine i think it's really accessible the thing that would present it prevented is the plot right like you're looking for plot you're looking for plot too i think at the same time and well i mean we kind of said the same time we need to take a breath between short stories so i don't know if that's a demerit or a credit to the readability i don't know that it's either i think it's just part of it yeah current relevance of central questions ten well i was trying to think about this book getting published now and i i don't know that lehira 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 i think for this book to be published now in this particular moment i think that there would probably be an expectation that this book would be a whole lot more about like the discrimination that some from an immigrant community yes um 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 um in the way that it's thinking about about yeah 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 like like the stories that would come out of writing about immigrants maybe would be of different form but that's this idea of like what does it mean to be american was it mean to deal with difference like there's a whole bunch of things in there but we eight nine ten somewhere in there we could go rebecca i leave it let's go with a nine it's high okay book nerd read cred this is a tough one short story collections wins a Pulitzer prize but yet everyone bought it so i don't know it's like it's like oh cool you like nirvana i think reading a short story collection immediately gets you to book cred to book nerd like there's i totally agree i totally agree of people who actually but it's 200 pages yeah let's go eight and a half eight point five very cool oh damn factor laura couldn't breathe i mean i don't know what else to say if you can if you read a short story and you have cease functioning that has to be a 10 i would think it's a 10 but at its best i would give it a 10 it does yeah that is better we only really great 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 always so wonderful where can the people find right now as of today april 28th in bookstores my book middleman literary agents in the making of american fiction has come out today it's got i've got it right here it's got a very pretty pink cover and i really love it but otherwise i am on sub stack i write a sub stack 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 like be able to mention it here uh that's like saying i'm on linkedin guys because here we we are merchants of cool as you know laura so we will arbitrate and dispense coolness according to our women interest um wild stallion style by the time you hear this i will have read and talk to laura about her book on the book riot podcast so you know i'm gonna be curly headed and shredding guitars of knowledge i'm gonna be expecting you at that point to get an earlier comment about how none of us are concerned with craft you wait i'm saying we're concerned with people and if you are you got to show receipts we expect to see you to drafts of your terrible short stories or inbox tomorrow if you're really calling me on that but i do want to call out yeah that episode will be in the book riot podcast feed by the time this is landing in zero to well read so if you want to hear more of like the how publishing works stuff uh 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 podcast shoot us an email zero to well read at book riot dot com doesn't matter what episode in it if it's six months ago if it was earlier in the run we are very interested in your own reading journey and your takes and your read-alikes and your corrections my dad texted me the other day hi dad that the hunters uh took place during the korean war i don't know what we said but apparently we got it wrong rebecca so consider that's my bad sorry dad getting at the same time that's okay dad and of course thanks to thrift book for sponsoring this season of zero to well red and zero to well red as a proud member of the airway podcast network thanks everybody a great story like monsters ink stays with you forever and disney class is where you'll find your next great story from the return of the award-winning hit series rivals welcome to the naughtiest show on television to the unmissable crime drama high potential gotta dead body gotta go a lifetime of great stories awaits this spring on disney plus 18 plus subscription required tz and c's 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