 
Check back here in May for details about
the 2005 book selection. TwoTowns: One Book 2004 The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri  Read it! Check here to find out where to borrow or buy the book, and for a link to a Reading Group Guide.  About Jhumpa Lahiri! Read Jhumpa Lahiri's biography here.
Read more about it! Links to information about Jhumpa Lahiri and The Namesake on the web. About Two Towns: One Book! Read more about the thoughts behind planning this event and the book selection. Two Towns: One Book is sponsored by the South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race, the Maplewood and South Orange Public Libraries and Seton Hall University.  Read it!Available for borrow or purchase at local libraries, and for purchase at the Maplewood Memorial Library (Main and Hilton Branch sites), South Orange Public Library and Goldfinch Books in Maplewood. Get the Reading Group guide provided by Houghton Mifflin at http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/readers_guides/lahiri_namesake.php 
About Jhumpa Lahiri!
Jhumpa Lahiri was born 1967 in London, England, and raised in Rhode Island. She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in English literature, and of Boston University, where she received an M.A. in English, M.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was translated into twenty-nine languages and became a bestseller both in the United States and abroad. In addition to the Pulitzer, it received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. The Namesake is Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel. She lives in New York with her husband and son. Read more about it! Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors it received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America. In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail -- the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase -- that opens whole worlds of emotion. In The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri brings her poignant style and acute observations about what it means to be an immigrant, and what it means to be part of a family, to the cross-cultural, multigenerational story of the Ganguli family. It is 1967 when Ashoke Ganguli and his wife, Ashima, newlyweds in a traditional arranged marriage, arrive in Boston. Ashoke is there to pursue a degree in engineering and to follow the directive of a man whom he met briefly on a tragic train trip: "Pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can." Ashima, meanwhile, pines for the family and the life she's left behind in Calcutta. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the conflicts and confusions the Gangulis encounter in building a family across continents. Intent on respecting old ways, Ashima and Ashoke rely on a letter from India bearing the name chosen by a grandmother. But the letter never arrives, and a name must be given before the baby is released, so he is named Gogol after the Russian author whose writing, the reader learns, played a part in saving Ashoke's life. Lahiri follows the young Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with divided cultural loyalties, comic detours through an immigrant community, and wrenching relationships in and outside the home. Spanning three decades and crossing continents, The Namesake is at every moment intimate, as Lahiri swoops in on the perfect detail and emotion to reveal whole worlds in a phrase. Read an excerpt of the book at http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?textType=excerpt&titleNumber=681425 Hear NPR's Melissa Block's interview with Ms. Lahiri at http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=1415693 Watch Jeffrey Brown's interview with Ms. Lahiri at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec03/lahiri_10-16.html About Two Towns: One Book! The South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition has held several successful community forums in which authors of books related to the Coalition's mission have spoken. In preparation for the forums, the community was encouraged to read the books. Over twenty book groups took up the challenge in 1999 and read Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria (and other conversations on race) by Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum. Nearly 600 residents attended the author's forum! Early in 2002, over 350 residents joined us to hear Jane Lazarre discuss her life experiences described in Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness. Enthused by those outstanding receptions, Eleanor Winslow, a librarian at the Maplewood Public Library contacted the Community Coalition to suggest that we partner in a major undertaking: a community-wide read of a single book The Coalition took up the challenge, setting as its objective: To help build community through the shared experience of reading and discussing a book. The librarians at the South Orange Public Library were equally enthusiastic and quickly signed on! Many months and many, many books later, on Labor Day 2002 John Henry Days was announced as the first book for the first community-wide book read in New Jersey: Two Towns - One Book. Caucasia by Danzy Senna brought together community members in 2003. Two Towns: One Book includes scheduled events such as book discussions, the author's reading and community forum. Click on the links to see the archive for prior year books, the list of books suggested and considered by the selection committee, and to view the criteria established for the selection of the book. Do you have an idea for a book for our 2005 read? Would you like to join the committee to work on Two Towns: One Book 2005? Send an email to info@twotowns.org with your interest.
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