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Park City Library's 2005 “One Book, One Community” The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
 Read
an excerpt of the book: http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?textType=excerpt&titleNumber=681425
“From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri's critically acclaimed first novel is a finely wrought, deeply moving family drama that illuminates her signature themes: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the tangled ties between generations. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of an arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle in Cambridge , Massachusetts , where Ashoke does his best to adapt while his wife pines for home. When their son, Gogol, is born, the task of naming him betrays their hope of respecting old ways in a new world. And we watch as Gogol stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.” Reading
Group Guides' Page about this book and author: http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides3/namesake1.asp
”Lahiri's short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and her deeply knowing, avidly descriptive, and luxuriously paced first novel is equally triumphant. Ashoke Ganguli, a doctoral candidate at MIT, chose Gogol as a pet name for his and his wife's first-born because a volume of the Russian writer's work literally saved his life, but, in one of many confusions endured by the immigrant Bengali couple, Gogol ends up on the boy's birth certificate. Unaware of the dramatic story behind his unusual and, eventually, much hated name, Gogol refuses to read his namesake's work, and just before he leaves for Yale, he goes to court to change his name to Nikhil. Immensely relieved to escape his parents' stubbornly all-Bengali world, he does his best to shed his Indianness, losing himself in the study of architecture and passionate if rocky love affairs. But of course he will always be Gogol, just as he will always be Bengali, forever influenced by his parents' extreme caution and restraint. No detail of Nikhil's intriguing life is too small for Lahiri's keen and zealous attention as she painstakingly considers the viability of transplanted traditions, the many shades of otherness, and the lifelong work of defining and accepting oneself.” Book
Review from Book Reporter by Stephen M. Deusner: http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/0618485228.asp
About the Author, Jhumpa Lahiri
“Jhumpa Lahiri was born 1967 in London , England , and raised in Rhode Island . She is a graduate of Barnard College , where she received a B.A. in English literature, and of Boston University , where she received an M.A. in English, an M.A. in creative writing, an M.A. in comparative studies in literature and the arts, and a Ph.D. in renaissance studies. She has taught creative writing at Boston University , the Rhode Island School of Design, and the New School University . Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was translated into twenty-nine languages and became a bestseller both in the United States and abroad. It received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel, The Namesake, was a major national bestseller and was named the New York Magazine Book of the Year. She lives in New York with her husband and son.”
Washington
Post Interview with Ms. Lahiri by Carole Burns on Tuesday, October
7, 2003 at 1:00 PM: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31824-2003Aug22.html
Park Record's April 23-26, 2005 "One Book" Article Houghton Mifflin spotlights Park City's "One Book"
Printable Version in MS Word: Reading Group Guide.doc About “One Book, One Community” “One Book, One Community” is a program designed to get everyone in the community reading the same book and discussing topics raised in the book. “The idea is that the city that opens the same book closes it in greater harmony.” (Mary McGrory, The Washington Post , March 17, 2002) The program began in 1998 by the Washington Center for the Book in Seattle , Washington . Since then communities all over the nation have been joining in with their own programs. The Park City Library read Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven in 2004 and Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees in 2003 for its first “One Book” program. More "One Book"
programs per center for the book:
Or Purchase the book from:
The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol (Link to Fulltext of Short Story) Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol *Contact Teresa Ferguson with Questions: tferguson@parkcity.org
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