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An important idea is that reading a story changes the reader, that being with a story—and we should say, the implied author of the story—makes you a different, possibly better person. The implication here is not that there should be a Puritanical and censorious rule: “You are commanded to only read the Holy Scripture or Torah, because you are what you read!” It‘s more an acknowledgement that stories have an effect on us, one that it’s good to be aware of. If reading were not

Last time, we were musing about what connects the sections in Casting Shadows, that there seems to be a pattern of the narrator describing a situation she’s in and then in the next section she writes of an emotional reaction that may be related to it. Often what seems significant is the reaction left out, and I dare say this gets us into the delicious topic of first-person narrator unreliability. For example, the narrator has been invited to go on an outing with her friend, t

This week, a new story, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Casting Shadows, a short story or novel excerpt, published in the February 15th 2021 issue of The New Yorker. It was subsequently published as part of a full-length novel entitled Whereabouts. However, the text of Whereabouts, containing the short story, was first published in Italian in 2018, and then translated to English by Ms. Lahiri. Casting Shadows is not a continuous selection from Whereabouts but interestingly, comprised of vari