Jhumpa Lahiri writes fiction about the Indian immigrant experience in America. She surprised the literary world in 2001 when she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her very first full-length effort, a collection of short stories titled Interpreter of Maladies. The daughter of Bengali parents who immigrated to the United States, Lahiri attended school in New England, but also spent considerable time while growing up visiting her extended family in Calcutta, India. She uses Calcutta as the setting for three of the nine stories in Interpreter of Maladies and accurately contrasts Indian values with American values in her other stories. The eloquent language, mature observations, and delicate insights belied Lahiri's newcomer status, according to many critics, who welcomed her second work of fiction, 2003's The Namesake. Lahiri's first novel, the book details the story of a young Indian man trying to maintain his family's traditional values while dealing...