Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm honored to have as my guest, Jumpa Lahiri.

She is the author most recently of a novel, the namesake, published by Houghton Mifflin.

Her book of stories, interpreter of maladies, the namesake published by Houghton Mifflin. Her book of stories, interpreter of

maladies, was published by Houghton Mifflin as well, several years ago, now available in

paperback and won the Pulitzer Prize. I wanted to begin by asking you, this is an almost entirely metaphor-free style.

There's no, very little adornment in the prose, and most of it is extremely factual, not figurative.

Are there models, were there models for you for this kind of writing?

I hope so. I certainly look to other writers for guidance in my, you know, in my style, my sentences, in crafting my sentences. And I think the writers I

admire most in that regard tend to be very plain spoken, sort of very much in the background of

their work in a way.

And William Trevor is someone I greatly admire for that, for many reasons,

but particularly for his voice, which is to me so powerful,

but so very, very plain spoken at the same time. And I sort of strive for that. And I think more and more as I, as I, you know, move from work to work, I think I'm moving toward a more simple kind of way of telling things.

It amazed me because in the namesake,

the book's son is named by his father, Gogol,

who had been reading Gogol in India, in a train wreck, and it's the flapping of a page after

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