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Reading Jhumpa Lahiri's interpreter of Maladies as a short story cycle.(II. Reading, Re-Reading, Recovery)(Critical Essay)

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From: MELUS
Date: 20040922
Author:Brada-Williams, Noelle

It may at first seem strange to describe Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies as a short story cycle rather than simply as a collection of separate and independent stories. After all, from Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio to Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street, readers of the modern short story cycle are often cued to the unity of a collection by a single location and/or a small ensemble of recurring characters that serve to unite the various components into a whole, while Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning work features diverse and unrelated characters, a variety of ...