Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, the Indian American author, strikes again with a new novel, The Lowland. This Washington Post review features her ability in "steadily building one of the most powerful body of work on immigrants and their children", an important aspect of her writings.

"Her first collection, “Interpreter of Maladies,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, when she was only 33. Her first novel, “The Namesake,” was made into a film directed by Mira Nair. And now her somber new novel, “The Lowland,” arrives in the United States already shortlisted for Britain’s Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award, an extra­ordinary double boost it hardly needs to find an eager audience here in her adopted country. Her first collection, “Interpreter of Maladies,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, when she was only 33. Her first novel, “The Namesake,” was made into a film directed by Mira Nair. And now her somber new novel, “The Lowland,” arrives in the United States already shortlisted for Britain’s Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award, an extra­ordinary double boost it hardly needs to find an eager audience here in her adopted country."

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On the 100th anniversary of the birth of the famed novelist Albert Camus, the Smithsonian reporter returns to his birthplace, Algeria, in search for signs of his legacy. In this well-written article, he shares his findings, among which is a striking forgetfulness of one of the greatest writers of his time.

“Camus is regarded as a giant of French literature, but it was his North African birthplace that most shaped his life and his art. In a 1936 essay, composed during a bout of homesickness in Prague, he wrote of pining for “my own town on the shores of the Mediterranean...the summer evenings that I love so much, so gentle in the green light and full of young and beautiful women.” Camus set his two most famous works, the novels The Stranger and The Plague, in Algeria, and his perception of existence, a joyful sensuality combined with a recognition of man’s loneliness in an indifferent universe, was formed here.”

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