That Word-of-Mouth Magic: INTERPRETER OF MALADIES by Jhumpa Lahiri

How did a debut short story collection by an unknown writer become one of the most significant publishing successes of the 20th century? On this week’s episode of Zero to Well-Read, Jeff and Rebecca are joined by literary historian and data scientist Dr. Laura McGrath for a conversation about Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. They explore what makes Lahiri’s stories so meaningful and memorable, chart the book’s path from paperback original to Pulitzer Prize winner, and marvel at the word-of-mouth magic that turned a book that began with the most modest of prospects into a bestseller with more than 15 million copies in print.

I’m delighted to report that this episode manages to mention Spock, Mary Oliver, The March of the Peguins, and Dharma and Greg, all in deep appreciation for one of the best and most important short story collections of our time. In today’s companion newsletter, we’ll dive even deeper into some of Lahiri’s lore, what makes short stories so impressive and essential, the scandal behind the failed adaptation, and more.

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A Little About Lahiri

• Her actual name is Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri—more on that in a bit.
• Lahiri self-published her very first book at just nine years old, titled The Life of a Weighing Scale. She wrote the book as part of a school writing competition; she won, and her book was featured in the school’s library.
  • That book can be viewed in a larger collection of Lahiri’s writing at the New York Public Library, which acquired the collection in 2025.
• If you’re feeling underaccomplished, perhaps don’t compare yourself to Lahiri, whose education puts most of ours to shame:
  • She got her B.A. from Columbia’s Barnard College in English literature (and would eventually go on to teach there)
  • She earned not one, but three(!!) master’s degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and an M.A. in Comparative Literature.
  • She the went on to complete a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies at Boston U.
• The Interpreter of Maladies was the first paperback originals to win the Pulitzer, and one of only six (I believe) short story winners for fiction.

Out of Context Show Quotes

• “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?”
• “The first time someone has linked Jhumpa Lahiri and March of the Penguins. You heard it here, folks.”
• “But I guess to quote Lizzo, like with Lahiri especially, the short story is not a snack at all. Baby, it’s the whole damn meal!”
• “I did not expect to be thinking about Mary Oliver in the conversation.”
  “Oh well you’re always thinking about Mary Oliver.”
• “Justice for Twinkle!”
• “I think that short stories are our cure, our remedy for the malady of our lack of attention. But I also think that short stories are particularly about training and disciplining and directing our attention.” <<<< If you take nothing else away, let it be this. And yes, I’m very much talking to myself here.

It Came to Me in Grad School

Last fall, NPR’s Book of the Day podcast ran a series on “back to school books” where they covered titles you might expect to see on a school syllabus. The episode features a 1999 interview with NPR’s Liane Hansen, where Lahiri recalls that the phrase “interpreter of maladies” came to her while she was in grad school in Boston.

She’d run into an acquaintance who was working as an interpreter, and the phrase just popped into her head. She tucked it away, ruminating on it often as something that might make a nice title for a book someday. It would be another five years before it happened, but happen it did! Hear the discussion on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Another Name Game

Jhumpa Lahiri’s name is not actually Jhumpa Lahiri. Her actual name is Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri, and Jhumpa is a family nickname that stuck. I set out to find the meaning of this nickname, which according to The Bump means “charming” in Saskrit.

Then I thought to myself, maaaaybe I should go straight the source. That’s when I found this 2003 piece in The New York Times, where Lahiri claims the pet name actually means nothing at all.

My name, Jhumpa, which is my only name now, was supposed to be my pet name. My parents tried to enroll me in school under my good name, but the teacher asked if they had anything shorter. Even now, people in India ask why I’m publishing under my pet name instead of a real name… Jhumpa has no meaning. It always upset me. It’s like jhuma, which refers to the sound of a child’s rattle, but with a ”p.” In this country, you’d never name your child Rattle.

The Adaptation That Never Was

In 2014, it was announced that director Amitav Kaul would adapt Interpreter of Maladies, with plans to bring the stories to screen in a trilogy. A year later, this headline debuted at The Hollywood Reporter: ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ Film Investor Hunts for Millions Gone Missing.

The deal had been in progress since 2011, when an agreement between Rubin Films and IOM Film, in partnership with Kaul, was signed. Lots, and I do mean lots, of money was handed over by Rubin Films and another investor, with specific terms as to what was to be done with those funds in order to secure a line of credit for the film’s $8 million budget. Fats forward to 2015 when a New York judge gave Kaul a month to respond to a demand that $2 million be put in an escrow account, post haste.

You can catch up on the full messy timeline here, but these are the brass tacks: as of 2015, IOM Film was insolvent, Kaul was scraping to get by, and to date, the film has not been made.

The good news is that other Lahiri works have been adapted or are currently in progress. There’s this 2006 film based on The Namesake starring Kal Penn, and a Netflix adaptation of Unaccustomed Earth is in the works, starring Freida Pinto.

That Poe Guy Knew Some Stuff

Laura shared this quote by another master of the short story, Edgar Allen Poe, as written in a review of Nathanial Hawthorne’s “Twice Told Tales.” It really sums up the delicate and precise endeavor that is crafting a good short story.

A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition, there should be no words written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed: and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided.

Preach, Poe.

Quotables

• “I was charmed by the theatricality of Mr. Prizada’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.” – from “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”
• “In fact the only thing that appeared three-dimensional about Burima was her voice, brittle with sorrows, as tart as curds and shrill enough to grate meat from a coconut.” – from “A Real Durwan”
• “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.” – from “This Blessed House”

Extra Credit

Readalikes and Such

From Rebecca:

• Unaccustomed Earth and Roman Stories – because you can’t go wrong with more Jhumpa Lahiri
• Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda – an award-winning debut short story collection from 2024 set in a reimagined Lagos
• Two author recommendations: Simon Rich for stories that are funny, and Percival Everett for the strange and surprising.

From Laura:

• Krik? Krak! or anything really, by Edwidge Danticat – one of a few suggestions of collections working in an international tradition and on moving between cultures
• Tenth of December by George Saunders – sits in the regionalist tradition, and is another really significant short story collection
• Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason – a collection that debuted a decade before Interpreter of Maladies, which got readers reinvested in the idea of short stories
• anything by Ann Beattie – another author whose work investigated regionalist traditions and cultures, and also some of the same questions that interest Lahiri

From Jeff:

• Willa Cather, specifically My Antonia. Though it is about a very different kind of immigrant experience evokes some of the same feelings as Lahiri’s work

Supplemental Reading (and Watching/Listening)

• In this 2013 New Yorker interview with Lahiri in her Brooklyn home, she shares how she never really thought about being a writer growing up. She read Little Women and saw Jo March do the writer thing, but never thought to herself, “well I’d like to do that too.”
• Lahiri thinks and writes a lot about language, as evidenced by this sampler of speeches, articles, and interviews.
  • Speaking on hybrid identity in her 2024 Induction Weekend speech at Columbia University’s Barnard College: “From childhood, I lived partly in one language, partly in another. My upbringing had two landscapes, two idioms, two traditions, a juxtaposition of values. I wrote to explore different parts of me.”
  • In a 2024 episode of Now What? with Carole Zimmer, Lahiri goes deeper into the experience of living between two languages and cultures, the profound pressures that come after winning a Pulitzer Prize, and how moving to Rome in 2012 made her fall in love with the Italian language—so much so that she began writing her books in Italian. She apparently still does this, though perhaps not exclusively.
  • “Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I’m also more exposed. It’s true that a new language covers me, but unlike Daphne I have a permeable covering – I’m almost without a skin. And although I don’t have a thick bark, I am, in Italian, a tougher, freer writer, who, taking root again, grows in a different way.” – Read the whole excerpt from In Other Words, translated by Ann Goldstein and published by Bloomsbury, in this piece in The Guardian from 2016.