A short memoir, a collection of essays, and three novels

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We had moved to Cairo in October, 2011, during the first year of the Arab Spring.  We lived in Zamalek, a neighborhood on a long, thin island in the Nile River.  Zamalek has traditionally been home to middle- and upper-class Cairenes, and we rented an apartment on the ground floor of an old building that, like many structures on our street, was beautiful but fading.  Out in front of the Art Deco façade, the bars of a wrought-iron fence were shaped like spiderwebs.  
--From "Morsi the Cat," a personal history by Peter Hessler, The New Yorker (May 7, 2018), pp. 22-28.  (The online version appears with the title "Cairo: A Type of Love Story.") 

Though there's an industry built on telling you otherwise, there are few real joys to middle age.  The only perk I can see is that, with luck, you'll acquire a guest room.
--From "Company Man," the first essay in Calypso, a collection by David Sedaris (Little, Brown and Company, 2018). 

All this happened quite a few years ago.  My mother had been unwell for some time.  To put a stop to my brothers' nagging and my father's especially, she finally went to see the doctor she always saw, the doctor my family had used since the dawn of time. . . . When [the results] finally arrived, three weeks later rather than two, it turned out that she had stomach cancer.  Her first reaction was as follows: Good Lord, here I've been lying awake night after night, year after year, especially when the children were small, terrified of dying from lung cancer, and then I get cancer of the stomach.  What a waste of time!    
--From I Curse the River of Time, a novel by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund with Per Petterson (Graywolf Press, 2010).  First published in Norwegian as Jeg forbanner tidens elv (Oktober Forlag, Oslo, Norway, 2008). 

I was thirteen years old and about to start the seventh class at Veitvet School.  My mother said she would go with me on the first day--we were new to the area, and anyway she had no job--but I didn't want her to.  
--From It's Fine By Me, a novel by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Graywolf Press, 2012/Picador, 2013).  First published in Norway by Forlaget Oktober, 1992, and in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, a division of Random House Group Ltd, London.   

Oki was alone in the observation car [of the Kyoto express].  Slouched deep in his armchair, he watched the end chair turn.  Not that it kept turning in the same direction, at the same speed: sometimes it went a little faster, or a little slower, or even stopped and began turning in the opposite direction.  To look at that one revolving chair, wheeling before him in the empty car, made him feel lonely.  Thoughts of the past began flickering through his mind.
       It was the twenty-ninth of December.  Oki was going to Kyoto to hear the New Year's Eve bells.  
--From Beauty and Sadness, a novel by Yasunari Kawabata, translated from the Japanese by Howard S. Hibbett (Vintage International, 1996).  First published in Japanese as Utsukushisa To Kanashimi To (Chuo koronosha, Tokyo, Japan, 1961).  First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf (1975).