Jhumpa Lahiri

Lahiri's fiction is known for focusing on Indian-American characters who are caught between two cultures, and she tells her stories both from the perspectives of the parents who moved from India to the U.S. and of the children who have grown up in the U.S.

Lahiri made a name for herself with the publication of her first story collection The Interpreter of Maladies, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998. This is especially astounding because of how little recognition is given to the short story form in recent years. She also has a novel, The Namesake, which was turned into a movie; in 2008, she published another collection, a New York Times best seller, Unaccustomed Earth. "Once in a Lifetime" comes from Unaccustomed Earth and was originally published in The New Yorker in 2006. The story is part of a section of three stories about the same characters, grouped together under the name "Hema and Kaushik."

The book critic and poet Anis Shivani has named Lahiri one of the most recent "overrated" writers in an article in which he had this to say:

Utterly unwilling (though probably fully capable, since she's the only readable writer on this list) to write about anything other than privileged Bengali immigrants with PhDs living in Cambridge's Central and Inman Squares, and making easy adjustments to the top of the American meritocratic pyramid. Determined to shun any stylistic influences besides Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant. Has staked out a very marketable niche territory and is never going to venture beyond it. Never a good sign when the movie based on a writer's only novel (The Namesake) is better than the book (there's no character in The Namesake that generates as much sympathy as Irfan Khan or Kal Penn in the movie). The protagonist's whole circle of immigrant elders moves from MIT to Harvard, but he's traumatized by whether his nickname (or given name) brands him an outsider! Invariably maintains coy persona of a modest writer in whose lap everything just happened to drop because of luck--come to think of it, this may not be far from the truth. There is such a thing as New Yorker fiction, even today--just read one of her upcoming stories about Central Square PhD Bengali immigrants effortlessly shedding their native ways. Possesses the talent to be so much more adventurous in theme and style--but remorseless caution stops her.

Here, however, is praise for Jhumpa Lahiri's writing, including praise for the story we're reading. Lahiri discusses Unaccustomed Earth in this Bookforum interview. Here is a link to Charlie Rose's interview with Lahiri -- she discusses how she got started with writing, how she studied other writers as she was working on developing her own stories, her thoughts on the story as a form, and what she was trying to do in her collection.