In this week's books podcast, Sam Leith is joined by the Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer Jhumpa Lahiri. Someone whose own fiction has negotiated the cross-cultural territory of her Bengali-American identity, Jhumpa in the last few years has been negotiating a new crossing of cultures after settling in Rome with her family and starting to write fiction and memoir in Italian. She joins the podcast to discuss the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, which she edited, and talk about what a new language gives a writer, how the war shaped Italian literature, and why - as a professor of creative writing at Princeton - she refuses to teach creative writing.

Spectator Books is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, the Spectator's Literary Editor.