Pulitzer Prize Follow-Up

The downside to debuting with a hit, hip bit of fiction is that everybody's watching as you write the second one. Jhumpa Lahiri has it especially tough, since her first book, a 1999 story collection called ''Interpreter of Maladies,'' trumped all but a few debuts in history by winning the Pulitzer Prize. Her follow-up novel, a multigenerational tale of a Bengali family in America called ''The Namesake,'' sticks close to ''Interpreter'''s themes of immigrant assimilation. ''With a short-story author, you always wonder: Can this writer translate those concerns for a broader range of characters and situations?'' says her editor at Houghton Mifflin, Janet Silver. Lahiri didn't want to respond publicly to this or any other questions yet, but naturally Silver has an answer for us: ''She just fulfills all that promise beautifully.'' (September)