National Best Seller From the best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize
winner, a powerful nonfiction debut--an honest, engaging, and very moving
account of a writer searching for herself in words. --Kirkus Reviews
(starred) In Other Words is a revelation. It is at heart a love story--of a
long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on
obsession: that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that
love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip
to Florence after college. Although Lahiri studied Italian for many years
afterward, true mastery always eluded her. Seeking full immersion, she
decides to move to Rome with her family, for a trial by fire, a sort of
baptism into a new language and world. There, she begins to read, and to
write--initially in her journal--solely in Italian. In Other Words, an
autobiographical work written in Italian, investigates the process of
learning to express oneself in another language, and describes the journey
of a writer seeking a new voice. Presented in a dual-language format, this
is a wholly original book about exile, linguistic and otherwise, written
with an intensity and clarity not seen since Vladimir Nabokov: a startling
act of self-reflection and a provocative exploration of belonging and
reinvention. From the Hardcover edition.