A novel by Geetanjali Shree, a novel excerpt by Susan Minot, and stories by Uche Okonkwo, Akhil Sharma, and Alejandro Zambra

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Of course Beti had heard; the ears on one's back are rarely blocked. And indeed, her friend may or may not have been aware of the household's quirks. Whether or not the chrysanthemums heard, it made no difference to them. It was their season, they were enjoying leaping up at the slightest thing, and so continued on with this pastime. 
—From Tomb of Sand, a novel by Geetanjali Shree, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell (HarperVia, 2023). This segment is from page 29 of the hardcover. The book was originally published in Hindi as Ret Samadhi in India (Rajkamal Prakashan, 2018) and was originally published in English as Tomb of Sand in the United Kingdom (Tilted Axis Press, 2021). The translation of this novel is quite long, with a lot of wordplay and tangential flights of fancy. My favorite sections are about the chrysanthemums, the crows, and Ma's friend Rosie Bua.  

Udoka was disappointed to find that her prospective in-laws' house wasn't two stories tall, with a uniformed guard and a big gate to keep out prying eyes. But though not as impressive as Udoka had imagined, it was still a better house than her mother's. It was painted, for one, and the corrugated roof wasn't coming apart with rust.
—From "Nwunye Belgium," the opening story of A Kind of Madness, a short story collection by Uche Okonkwo (Tin House, 2024). "Nwunye Belgium" was first published, as "Our Belgian Wife," in One Story, Issue 248 (December 20, 2018) and was reprinted in The Best American Nonrequired Reading (Mariner Books, 2019).  

She did not hesitate now. She phoned Dr. Rosencrantz. But Dr. Rosencrantz was not the doctor on call, the answering service said. A Dr. Estin answered. He sounded as if he was outside. She heard a bird singing. Dr. Estin was decidedly unconcerned, and even over the phone she could tell he was bored. It was perfectly normal, he explained, to cough up a little blood after a tonsillectomy. It was nothing to worry about. He seemed irritated that she was even bothering him. 
—From "The Operation," a novel excerpt by Susan Minot, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 100, No. 2 (August 9, 2024). This story also has an illustration by Michelle Thompson.

Mrs. Narayan was small, dark-skinned, oval-faced. She had a wonderful singsong voice. She'd come up to you at temple on Holi or Diwali and offer congratulations so heartfelt you'd feel as if it were the first time the day had ever been celebrated. We all liked her. She was an immigrant, too, but she didn't seem to have jangled nerves the way we did. She cooked for many of us and regularly tried to refuse payment. "This is from my side," she'd say. "A horse can't be friends with grass," we might answer.
—From "The Narayans," a short story by Akhil Sharma, The New Yorker (August 26, 2024).

The first lie Julio told Emilia was that he had read Marcel Proust. He didn't usually lie about his reading, but that second night, when they both knew they were starting something, and that however long it lasted, this something was going to be important—that night, Julio deepened his voice, feigning intimacy, and said that, yes, he had read Proust when he was seventeen, during a summer in Quintero. 
—From Bonsai, a very short novel by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Penguin, 2022). Originally published in Barcelona, Spain, as Bonsái (Editorial Anagrama, 2006).

Poetry by Louise Glück, an essay by Akhil Sharma, and fiction by Choi Eunyoung and Domenico Starnone

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My story begins very simply: I could speak and I was happy.
Or: I could speak, thus I was happy.
Or: I was happy, thus speaking.
I was like a bright light passing through a dark room. 
—From Faithful and Virtuous Night, an award-winning collection of poems by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). This section is from the title poem, pp. 8-17. My other favorite poems in this collection are "A Sharply Worded Silence," pp. 19-21; "The Melancholy Assistant," pp. 45-46; and "A Foreshortened Journey," pp. 47-48.

She kept checking her reflection in building windows. This was our first invitation to someone's home since we'd arrived [in Germany] three months before, so I guessed Mom was feeling nervous in a good way.
         "Xin chào." Mom said the memorized Vietnamese greeting when Mrs. Nguyển opened the front door. I chimed in, "Xin chào," and Mrs. Nguyển smiled in delighted surprise. She greeted us like we were old friends she hadn't seen in years. Mr. Hồ was in the kitchen. His ruddy cheeks and boyishly mischievous face instantly won me over. Mr. Hồ was Dad's coworker, and when he discovered I'd become classmates with his son, Thuỷ, he invited our whole family to his house.
        The dinner Mr. Hồ made was simple, cozy fare. I'm not sure if you can call food "cozy," but there's no other word for it. Beef stew with tomatoes cooked over a slow fire, fragrant steamed rice, grilled prawns, sauteed vegetables, savory fried dumplings with half a lime squeezed over them. 
—From Shoko's Smile, a collection of short stories by Choi Eunyoung, translated from the Korean by Sung Ryu (Penguin Books, 2021). This section is from "Xin Chào, Xin Chào," pp. 59-85. My other favorite story in this collection is the last one, "The Secret," pp. 232-256. 

Christine grew up very poor in Dublin. As a child, she experienced periodic bouts of homelessness. When her family was able to get public housing, it was in a neighborhood where heroin was endemic. The family eventually settled in an area where children were regularly attacked by a local pit bull and people would come running with flaming torches, because fire was one of the few things that would make the dog unclench its jaws. I grew up with a severely brain-damaged brother, whom my parents took care of at home. My brother could not walk or talk or roll over in his sleep. Some nights, we didn't have health aides and my parents stayed up to turn him from side to side so he wouldn't get bedsores. My wife and I are careful people. We feel lucky to have the lives we have, and we don't want to mess them up. Our imaginary child was not careful at all.
        Normally, it is the parents who imagine a future for the child and, through the imagining, hold open a space for the child to step into. In our case, it was the reverse.
—From "A Passage to Parenthood," published in print as "Imagining Ziggy," a personal essay by Akhil Sharma, The New Yorker (January 31, 2022), pp. 24-28.

On that occasion, maybe I interrupted her one too many times, since I liked the girl from Arles and wanted her to like me. Then Teresa turned to me, furious, seizing the bread knife and shouting: try to cut off what I'm saying one more time and I'll cut out your tongue and then some. We faced off in public as if we were alone, and today I believe we really were, such was the extent that we were absorbed with each other, for good and for ill. Our acquaintances were there, sure, and the girl from Arles, but they were inessential figures, all that mattered was our ongoing attraction and repulsion. It was as if our boundless admiration for each other only served to ascertain that we loathed each other, and vice versa.
—From Trust, a novel by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions, 2021). This segment appears on page 15. 

A Life of Adventure and Delight and other fiction

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I've been waiting a while to read A Life of Adventure and Delight, a collection of short stories by Akhil Sharma (W. W. Norton, 2017), and it was worth it.  Even the stories I'd read before knocked me out all over again.  (Some, if not all of them, have been revised since the original publications.)  David Sedaris wrote a couple of lines about the book that were included on the dust jacket of the hardcover: "There's a great duality to these stories: simple but complex, funny enough to laugh out loud at but emotionally devastating, foreign yet familiar.  What an exciting and original writer this is, and what a knock-out collection."  This really does sum it up. 

A little after ten in the morning Mrs. Shaw walked across Gopal Maurya's lawn to his house.  It was Saturday, and Gopal was asleep on the couch.  The house was dark.  When he first heard the doorbell, the ringing became part of a dream.  Only he had been in the house during the four months since his wife had followed his daughter out of his life, and the sound of the bell joined somehow with his dream to make him feel ridiculous.  Mrs. Shaw rang the bell again.  Gopal woke confused and anxious, the state he was in most mornings.  He was wearing only underwear and socks, but his blanket was cold from sweat.
--From "Cosmopolitan," a short story by Akhil Sharma, A Life of Adventure and Delight, pp. 13-45.  "Cosmopolitan" was first published in The Atlantic (January 1997).

One August afternoon, when Ajay was ten years old, his elder brother, Birju, dove into a pool and struck his head on the cement bottom.  For three minutes, he lay there unconscious.  Two boys continued to swim, kicking and splashing, until finally Birju was spotted below them.  
--From "Surrounded by Sleep," a short story by Akhil Sharma, A Life of Adventure and Delight, pp. 47-67.  An earlier version of "Surrounded by Sleep" was first published in The New Yorker (December 10, 2001).  (It shares a lot of details with Family Life, but even though I'd read that first, the story still had impact.) 

The side of the police van slid open, rattling, and he was shoved inside.  There were seven or eight men already sitting on the floor in the dark, their wrists handcuffed behind them.  Nobody said anything.  The van started with a jerk, then picked up speed.  His legs were stretched out in front of him, and he tried to use his cuffed hands to balance himself, but the plastic cuffs tightened, and he and the other men went rolling across the floor like loose bottles.  
--From "A Life of Adventure and Delight," a short story by Akhil Sharma, A Life of Adventure and Delight, pp. 127-145.  "A Life of Adventure and Delight" was first published in The New Yorker (May 16, 2016). 

We lived frugally.  If somebody was coming to the house, my mother moved the plastic gallon jugs of milk to the front of the refrigerator and filled the other shelves with vegetables from the crisper.  
--From "The Well," a short story by Akhil Sharma, A Life of Adventure and Delight, pp. 185-199.  "The Well" was first published in The Paris Review (Fall 2016). 


This is going to be--no, I don't want to be categorical--this could be the start of a virtuous circle.  My psychologist has told me that I need to say positive things to myself, only I don't want to be too positive, as that might just make things worse.  But I can say this: My life is a mess and I'm going to try to sort it out, starting with the small things.  Then, later, I'll be able to deal with bigger, more complicated things; buying blinds is a lifeline that's been thrown to me from dry land as I flail and flounder in the waves, I muse, and I park the car outside IKEA.
--From "Nice and Mild," a short story by Gunnhild Øyehaug, from her collection Knots, translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), pp. 3-12.  I first read Øyehaug's story "Two by Two," Knots pp. 142-164, in The Best of McSweeney's, a collection edited by Dave Eggers and Jordan Bass (McSweeney's, 2013).  It was previously included in Issue 35 of the magazine in a section dedicated to Norwegian fiction. 

A poem by Ryan Fox and fiction by Akhil Sharma, Miroslav Penkov, and Anthony Doerr

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You were all over everything. 
I just wanted to read "The Four Quartets."
But there was your handwriting, . . .  
--From "And Both Hands Wash the Face," a poem by Ryan Fox, The New Yorker (May 8, 2017), p. 38.

"Break her arms, break her legs," Lakshman's grandmother would say about her daughter-in-law, "then see how she crawls to her bottle."  What she said made sense.  Lakshman's father refused to beat his wife, though.  "This is America," he said.  "I will go to jail and you will be sitting in India eating warm pakoras." 
--From "You Are Happy?," a short story by Akhil Sharma, The New Yorker (April 17, 2017), pp. 58-63.

Five summers slipped by.  I went to school in the village and in the afternoons I helped Father with the fields.  Father drove an MTZ-50, a tractor made in Minsk.  He'd put me on his lap and make me hold the steering wheel and the steering wheel would shake and twitch in my hands, as the tractor plowed diagonally, leaving terribly distorted lines behind.
        "My arms hurt," I'd say.  "This wheel is too hard."
        "Nose," Father would say, "quit whining.  You're not holding a wheel.  You're holding Life by the throat.  So get your shit together and learn how to choke the bastard, because the bastard already knows how to choke you." 
--From "East of the West," a short story by Miroslav Penkov, The PEN/O'Henry Prize Stories 2012, pp. 157-181.  ("East of the West" was first published in Orion Magazine in May/June 2011).

Tom is born in 1914 in Detroit, a quarter mile from International Salt.  His father is offstage, unaccounted for.  His mother operates a six-room, underinsulated boardinghouse populated with locked doors, behind which drowse the grim possessions of itinerant salt workers: coats the color of mice, tattered mucking boots, aquatints of undressed women, their breasts faded orange.  Every six months a miner is fired or drafted or dies and is replaced by another, so that very early in his life Tom comes to see how the world continually drains itself of young men, leaving behind only objects--empty tobacco pouches, bladeless jackknives, salt-caked trousers--mute, incapable of memory.  
--From "The Deep," a short story by Anthony Doerr, The PEN/O'Henry Prize Stories 2012, pp. 352-370.  ("The Deep" was first published in Zoetrope, Volume 14, Number 3, in Fall 2010).

Two novels and an excerpt from a book-length poem

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        My father has a glum nature.  He retired three years ago, and he doesn't talk much.  Left to himself, he can remain silent for days.  When this happens, he begins brooding, he begins thinking strange thoughts.  Recently he told me that I was selfish, that I had always been selfish, that when I was a baby I would start to cry as soon as he turned on the TV.  I am forty and he is seventy-two.  When he said this, I began tickling him.  I was in my parents' house in New Jersey, on a sofa in their living room.  "Who's the sad baby?" I said.  "Who's the baby that cries all the time?"
        "Get away," he squeaked, as he fell back and tried to wriggle away.  "Stop being a joker.  I'm not kidding." 
--From Family Life, a novel by Akhil Sharma (W.W. Norton, 2014). 

        He is twenty-six, and for as long as he's lived in the north there has been only the Aleut woman. 
        Several evenings a week he comes to her door with a duck or a rabbit and she asks him in.  Not asks, exactly.  She opens the door and steps aside so he can enter.
        She lives in a frame house hammered together fast out of boards and tar paper, a house like all the others in Anchorage, except it isn't on First or Fourth or even Ninth Street; instead it is off to the east, marooned on the mud flats.  But she has things in it, like anyone else, a table and two chairs, flour and tea on a shelf, a hat hanging from a peg.  She wears a dress with buttons and she cooks at a stove, and the two of them eat before, and then after she sits cross-legged in the tub and smokes her pipe. 
--From The Seal Wife, a novel by Kathryn Harrison (Random House, 2002). 

Come, it's time to set the table,
dusk is bruised with rain, the water is alive
under the wind, evening is
upon us.  Outside, the animals make their
accommodation, the lake loses its reflection,
settles deeper.  Set down the brush
on the saucer, leave off the book,
open, with its words against the pillow. . . . 
--From Correspondences, a collaboration by poet Anne Michaels and artist Bernice Eisenstein (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).  An excerpt from the book-length poem was included in Knopf's Poem-a-Day newsletter, in honor of Poetry Month, on April 26, 2014.  The excerpted material is also available online as a printable  broadside.   

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules

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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, a collection of stories edited and introduced by David Sedaris (Simon & Schuster, 2005).

I read this as slowly as I possibly could, hoping that he'd have a new collection of essays out by the time I finished, but no dice.

Some of the stories that really stuck out to me were ones I'd already read (e.g., "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri; "People Like That Are the Only People Here" by Lorrie Moore--who every once in a while has a wonderful, perfect sentence; and "Cosmopolitan" by Akhil Sharma) but this was an interesting collection.

Among others, Sedaris also included "Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired" by Richard Yates, "Gryphon" by Charles Baxter, "The Garden Party" by Katherine Mansfield, "Half a Grapefruit" by Alice Munro, "Applause, Applause" by Jean Thompson, "Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out" by Patricia Highsmith, "Song of the Shirt, 1941" by Dorothy Parker, "The Girl with the Blackened Eye" by Joyce Carol Oates, "Revelation" by Flannery O'Connor, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel, "Irish Girl" by Tim Johnston, and "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff.

Side note: Purchase of this book helps support 826NYC, a nonprofit tutoring center in Brooklyn, New York.