Author Jhumpa Lahiri.

Jennifer Graylock

Jhumpa Lahiri, the literary wunderkind who parlayed an “outsider’s” childhood in South Kingstown into a collection of short stories that won the Pulitzer Prize, then wrote a novel that won worldwide acclaim and became a movie, is about to do it again.

She will launch her third book, a collection of longer stories titled Unaccustomed Earth, Friday at the Brown University Bookstore in Providence. Like her first collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), and her novel, The Namesake (2003), it deals with people who live in two worlds and, like Lahiri herself, fully belong to neither.

If the first reviews are any indication, that will set off another round of full-throated hosannas from critics at home and abroad. Virtually all of them will trace the parallels between Lahiri’s life and those of her characters. Most will cite her compelling descriptions, her tightly controlled prose and her ability to inhabit the inner and outer lives of the people in her stories so thoroughly that within a few pages we know them better than we know our own friends.

A few of those reviewers, the intrepid or dogged ones, will try to explain how she does it — how she creates the magic at the heart of deceptively simple passages like this one in the story “Only Goodness,” in which she describes the slipping of a once-firm bond between a sister and her younger brother as he enters his rebellious teenager phase:

His aloofness troubled Sudha, but her parents said nothing. He seemed always to be in a slightly bad mood and in urgent need to get somewhere — to his job, to a gym where he went to lift weights, to the video store to return one of the foreign films he would watch when everyone else was asleep. She and Rahul never argued, but there were moments, when she crossed paths with him in the hallway or asked him to pass her the remote control, when she was briefly convinced he despised her.

Their explanations will all fail, if the past is any guide. And that’s no great surprise: Lahiri herself doesn’t know how she does it.

“It’s always very daunting, and something of a miracle, when a character does come to life on the page,” she said in a recent phone interview from her home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, N.Y. “It’s hard. It’s hard for me to make that happen. It’s something I’m still working on and will continue to work on over time . . . .”

Her stories are about family and personal relationships. Often there is no great drama, no suspense, no mystery — just the emotional lives of ordinary people. Readers may wonder why they find them as absorbing as they do, even as they rush through the pages to see what happens.

Most of Lahiri’s characters are deeply rooted in her own rootlessness: Indians from Bengal or Calcutta transplanted to the “unaccustomed earth” of America — or their children, living here, but not fully American.

Lahiri was born in London in 1967, but came to America soon after. From the age of 3, she grew up in South Kingstown, where her parents still live. Her father, Amar, is a librarian at the University of Rhode Island, her mother, Tia, a teacher’s assistant at the South Road Elementary School. In her fiction, and in her conversation, it is clear that family ties remain strong.

“You know, family was the only thing to hold on to,” she says of her childhood. “There was a sort of private language — literally private language — and experiences that weren’t being mirrored in the outside world. And to have no other family in the entire United States when I was growing up is an intense feeling.”

Her parents, she explained, felt more Indian than American when she was young, and in some ways still do. So there was always a feeling of isolation. “We had friends, and as I grew older I made my own friends, but there’s still something very fundamental about that.”

“I didn’t understand it when I was a kid,” she said in a previous interview with The Journal, in 2003. “I just wondered, why didn’t my parents fit in? Why are they not American? Why didn’t I fit in? I didn’t really think about what they went through until I was an adult.”

So the sources of alienation that many of her characters feel, as well as the emotional bonds that unite them, are easily traced. Indeed, her characters are so compelling, so fully realized, that there’s a temptation to imagine autobiographical counterparts for all of them. It should be resisted.

In fact, Lahiri says, her characters “are usually composites, or imagined, in varying degrees. Sometimes they come more or less fully formed in the imagination, and then sometimes they are loosely based on someone — maybe not even someone I know well, maybe someone I just heard of. It really depends, from story to story.”

But how can someone who perceives herself as having been isolated, apart from her peers, without close friends, see into the hearts and minds of other people so deeply — even people she has never met? Perhaps, as with Emily Dickinson and some other “outsiders,” loneliness sharpens the ability to see more deeply, to intuit thoughts and feelings beyond the mere words that define and obscure most relationships.

“There is something to be said, I suppose, for not feeling part of a greater community,” Lahiri says over the phone. “It forces one to observe very carefully, to have that perspective, to be not fully within any given situation.

“I felt that on many levels. I felt that within my own family, not being fully a part of even the family that my mother and father created, because I led a more American type of life than they knew. And I also felt that when I was in situations with more fully ‘American’ friends, who didn’t have the same sort of upbringing I was having. I think that it did make me look at life the way I did, and continue to do.

“I suppose for a writer ultimately that [loneliness] becomes a comfortable place. I think for me, when I started writing, it became more of an advantage than a disadvantage. I felt it was more of a comfort than a cold, alienating experience. I tried to take what I was seeing and put it into my work, to create something out of it.”

Loneliness is not a word one would apply to Lahiri today, at age 41 — not after the Pulitzer Prize propelled her, with the force of a battering ram, into the public eye eight years ago. Not after her wedding a year later to Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then deputy editor of TIME Latin America — a three-day ceremony in India with 700 guests that attracted so much attention (Lahiri enjoyed a kind of rock star celebrity in India after the prize, despite never having lived there) that her mother persuaded her to hold a news conference for the reporters clambering to get in. Certainly not after the births of her children, Noor, age 3, and Octavio, who will be 6 next month.

The word that does come to mind is serenity. She radiates a calm acceptance of people and situations as they are. You sense it in the omniscient narrators of her stories, in the articles and interviews in which she talks about her writing talent as a mysterious gift, for which she deserves no personal credit, and in her carefully chosen words and carefully modulated voice, punctuated by bell-like laughter, over the phone from Brooklyn.

On the subject of her own celebrity, she says, “To be honest, it’s not something I’m aware of in my day-to-day life at all — which is good. I mean, I understand that my books have been very well received and celebrated and all of that, but, you know, our lives are pretty much standard-issue Brooklyn family life here, and that’s the way we like it, and that’s the way it is.”

(As if on cue, a high-pitched, urgent voice interrupts in the background: “Mommy! Mommy . . .!” “Hold on, I’m a little busy now,” Lahiri answers. There’s a muffled response. “Okay. Okay, yeah, I’ll be off the phone in a little bit and then we’ll have some cookies, okay? Actually, they’re out of the oven . . . .”)

Clearly the old isolation is gone. “I feel more at home, more grounded, more settled as a person,” she says. “You know, I’m in middle-age, have two kids, I’m married, I have a mortgage and all of those grownup things. So I feel more rooted, literally, to the place where I live.”

DOES SHE worry that she’ll lose her sensitivity to the immigrant experience?

“I hope not. I mean, I think so much of my writing stems from and is inspired by my parents and their experiences. I feel that as long as I live, I’m going to remain very close to my parents, and even when they are gone, I’m going to think about them for the rest of my life. They are my history, you know? So my sense is that I will continue to think about all of that, in different ways, perhaps.”

At the same time, she rejects, ever so gently, her assigned role as chronicler of the displaced:

“I don’t ever think of that consciously when I’m writing. I’m just trying to write stories about the human condition — about life and death and marriage and loss and growing up, growing old, and all of that stuff that everyone has always written about and everyone always will write about. I’m just trying to write about it in the way that I understood it, with the particularities of the way I understood it, but nothing beyond that.

“In the new book, yes, all of the characters are immigrants or children of immigrants, but that’s really not what’s happening on center stage in their lives. The things the characters are going through are, for lack of a better word, pretty universal experiences: parent-child relationships, brother-sister relationships, whatever it is.”

And because we are all immigrants in that universal sense — because the country we grew up in is not the same country we live in now, even if we’re still in the same house — we will continue to find ourselves in Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories.

Jhumpa Lahiri will discuss Unaccustomed Earth at the Brown Bookstore, 244 Thayer St., at 7:30 p.m. Friday, the book’s launch date.

driggs@projo.com