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The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

Rebecca Makkai Reads Jhumpa Lahiri

October 1, 2024·1 hr 19 min·5 clips
Rebecca Makkai explains how a short story can pull the narrative rug out from under the reader.
A flag on the moon. Deborah Treisman sets up the show's familiar ritual: one writer opens the archive and chooses a story to read. Rebecca Makkai did not need long. She picks Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent," published in the magazine in June 1999. The excerpt starts almost like a chant. Mrs. Croft keeps demanding the flag on the moon phrase, and the narrator learns to give it back to her. Then the joke tightens. Soup, tea, age, and the news that Mrs. Croft has lived past one hundred make him realize how badly he has misread her. He thought she was simply old. Now she is old in a way that makes the room feel riskier. His mind goes home to Calcutta: his father's death from encephalitis, his mother's grief, and the awful ordinary details no family member or clinic could stop. Lahiri keeps the language plain. Bracelets counted like an abacus. A body exposed before company. A walk toward the tram depot. Back in Mrs. Croft's house, even her bark cannot hide how breakable she suddenly seems. A scratch or cough feels dangerous. Helen's dry warning turns warmed soup into a possible threat. The reading is quiet, but it has pressure. Care, migration, memory, and survival all sit inside the same small room.

As heard by us

Rebecca Makkai's Lahiri selection finds its force in Mrs. Croft, the moon landing, and the private grief folded into ordinary domestic ritual.

Rebecca Makkai chooses Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent" for The New Yorker: Fiction, with Deborah Treisman placing the story in the magazine's archive before the reading begins. What comes through strongest is the strange, exact charge of the scenes around Mrs.

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Why you'd press play

A quiet, bookish listen built around Jhumpa Lahiri's 'The Third and Final Continent,' read and discussed on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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