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Discuss “Jubilee” by Jhumpa Lahiri

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Discuss “Jubilee” by Jhumpa Lahiri

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[We meet every Sunday when there's a new New Yorker, and we will meet on July 13, because the July 7 & 14 issue is the annual Fiction issue]

Greetings, Fictioneers!

On Sunday, July 13, 2025 at 4 pm CDT/5 pm EDT, on Zoom , we will discuss the second New Yorker Fiction story from the issue dated July 7 & 14, 2025: “Jubilee” by Jhumpa Lahiri. The story was inspired by a Mavis Gallant New Yorker story from 1976 (see below). Lahiri has been published in The New Yorker many times since her debut in 1998.

  1. Read “Jubilee”at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker's paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
  2. Want to listen to it? Use the “Listen to this story” on page audio app on the story page (46:15 at 1x speed). The author also reads the story at this link (47:56 with an intro).
  3. The author essay, “Jhumpa Lahiri on Mavis Gallant’s “Voices Lost in Snow”” is at this link.
  4. The story that inspired “Jubilee” is at this link.

If you prefer connecting by phone, the “one tap mobile” number is +13126266799,,88112982706#,,,,*007936# US (Chicago)

Jhumpa Lahiri published her first story in The New Yorker, “A Temporary Matter,” in 1998, a year before her Pulitzer-winning début collection, “Interpreter of Maladies,” was released. In the works that followed—the novels “The Namesake” and “The Lowland,” and the collection “Unaccustomed Earth”—she shed light on the challenges and alienations of immigration, and on the clashes between cultures and between generations. While living in Italy in the twenty-tens, she chose Italian as her writing language. “I think, see, and feel differently in Italian. I say things more simply but also more directly. And I tend to take more chances,” she told The New Yorker. In 2016, she published “In altre parole” (translated as “In Other Words”), an account of her experience learning the language, and in 2018 she released her first novel written first in Italian, “Dove mi trovo,” which she translated as “Whereabouts.”

- from The New Yorker contributors page for Lahiri, links excised

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