As Unaccustomed Earth starts showing up in bookstores, everybody wants to talk to Jhumpa Lahiri—and, as she tells Boris Kachka in her New York interview, one of the big topics is her literary focus on, in the profile's phrasing, "upwardly mobile South Asians from New England":

"'Is that all you've got in there?" I get asked that question all the time... It baffles me. Does John Updike get asked this question? Does Alice Munro? It's the ethnic thing, that's what it is. And my answer is always, yes, I will continue to write about this world, because it inspires me to write, and there's nothing more important than that."

Case in point: In last Friday's Wall Street Journal, Robert Hughes comes right out and asks, "Have you ever thought of writing about non-Indians?" To which her answer is, actually, "I don't think that way when I'm writing stories. I just write from the point of view of some individual, trying to form a character who happens to be those things." Kera Bolonik's Bookforum interview, by way of comparison, deals with the topic not just by saying, hey, you've got Indians in your stories, but by asking insightful questions about the issues of assimiliation Lahiri writes about, "the growing chasm between the families [her characters] are creating and those in which they grew up."

(photo: Peter Hapak/New York)