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).

Short stories and flash fiction by Parker Young, novels by Barbara Kingsolver and Gabriel García Márquez, and a bonus book to read again

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I decided to throw the chicken sandwich away but couldn't bring myself to touch it, the first step in the throwing-away process proved impossible, so I sat there while it sat there too, me in my chair, the sandwich on my plate, both of us in the kitchen listening to my wife talk or cry softly in the bedroom, where I pretended to sleep every night but couldn’t for no reason, no reason at all.
—From "Chicken Marriage Sandwich," a story by Parker Young, Always Crashing Magazine (May 22, 2022).  

In Bora Bora, crabs do the work of rodents at night, patrolling the gutters with a percussive, mechanical menace. Dogs sleep inches from the road; it looks like they've been struck down by careless drivers. I almost hit some of them myself in our rented Fiat Panda because I was attempting to learn, under [my brother-in-law] Harrison's tutelage, how to operate a manual transmission. I made the Panda lurch erratically around the road that circumvolves the island, like a model train powered by a sketchy generator, which was pretty close to the real situation mechanically, as Harrison kept trying to explain to me by repeating the story of the clutch and the drivetrain, the clutch and the drivetrain, a meaningless story, impossible to visualize, which I never even began to understand. While everyone else on the island only appeared to be driving recklessly (it was ultimately a sign of their mastery), I was actually doing it, because I had too much to think about all at once—the clutch, the gas, my error in taking this one-week job as Harrison's assistant—and it was embarrassing.  
—From "Disappearances," a story by Parker Young, from his debut collection of short fiction, Cheap Therapist Says You're Insane (Future Tense Books, 2023). I originally discovered this book via a list of new fiction, which led me to read "Chicken Marriage Sandwich," which was published in Always Crashing (see above). I liked the story so much that I ordered a copy of Cheap Therapist Says You're Insane. (Interestingly, the version of "Chicken Marriage Sandwich" that appears in the book is quite different. I definitely recommend reading the version in Always Crashing, even if you do read, or have already read, the collection.) This story, "Disappearances," is on pages 93-101 of the book. This particular segment appears on pages 94-95. I was making a list of my other favorite stories from the collection, but it ended up being too long. (I will single out "Repentance Rebate" and "Two Bathtubs in Memphis.") 

First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they've always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let's just say out of it.
          On any other day they'd have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she'd be, little bleach-blonde smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she's captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it's going down. This is an eighteen-year-old girl we're discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. The day she failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside, and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl tile, worming and shoving around because I'm still inside the sack that babies float in, pre-real-life.
          Mr. Peggot was outside idling his truck, headed for evening service, probably thinking about how much of his life he'd spent waiting on women. His wife would have told him the Jesusing could hold on a minute, first she needed to go see if the little pregnant gal had got herself liquored up again. Mrs. Peggot being a lady that doesn't beat around the bushes and if need be, will tell Christ Jesus to sit tight and keep his pretty hair on. She came back out yelling for him to call 911 because a poor child is in the bathroom trying to punch himself out of a bag.
—From Demon Copperhead, a novel by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper, 2022), winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.
          He found the corpse covered with a blanket on the campaign cot where he had always slept, and beside it was a stool with the developing tray he had used to vaporize the poison. On the floor, tied to a leg of the cot, lay the body of a black Great Dane with a snow-white chest, and next to him were the crutches.  
—From Love in the Time of Cholera, a novel by Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988). The book was originally published in Colombia as El amor en los tiempos del cólera in 1985.  

Bonus book to read again: 

That was the spring that Ian's brother fell in love. Up till then Danny had had his share of girlfriends—various decorative Peggies or Debbies to hang upon his arm—but somehow nothing had come of them. He was always getting dumped, it seemed, or sadly disillusioned. His mother had started fretting that he'd passed the point of no return and would wind up a seedy bachelor type. Now here was Lucy, slender and pretty and dressed in red, standing in the Bedloes' front hall with her back so straight, her purse held so firmly in both hands, that she seemed even smaller than she was. She seemed childlike, in fact, although Danny described her as a "woman" when he introduced her. "Mom, Dad, Ian, I'd like you to meet the woman who's changed my life." 
—From Saint Maybe, a novel by Anne Tyler (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991/Vintage reprint, 1996). 

Short stories by Michael Chabon, fiction by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, and poetry by Iman Mersal, James Harmon Clinton, and Valzhyna Mort

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Very early one Tuesday morning in March—I remember it was still dark, and there were three nurses waiting for a bus on the corner—I came in from the bone-snapping cold to find several lights on and the apartment warm. It surprised me to find Harry home, and awake, since lately he had taken to spending almost every night at Kim's, over on Beacon, and I was even more surprised that he had turned on the steam heat. Out of Harry's chronic tightfistedness—we were responsible for half of the heating bill—and some perverse impulse of mine to test our seven years' friendship, we had at some point during December made a tacit pact never to open the radiators, and ever since we had been going around the house in our ski caps and down coats, exhaling puffs of vapor in the frigid bathroom and wearing gloves to cook dinner; the clouds of steam produced by the act of dumping a boiling pot of spaghetti into a colander in the sink were thick and billowing. It was a kind of dare, to see who would succumb first to the cold, but it did not please me to discover that I had won. Something was the matter with Harry. 
—From "Millionaires," a short story by Michael Chabon, from his collection A Model World and Other Stories (Harper Perennial, 2005), pp. 105-127. The segment here is from pages 106-107. The collection was first published in hardcover by Avon in 1992. This particular story first appeared in The New Yorker, Issue 197 (January 29, 1990). If you have a subscription to The New Yorker, you can sign in and read "Millionaires" in a flipbook from the archive. The story starts on page 32 of the issue from January 29, 1990.

Night. The kid's asleep. I keep up my defences, though every now and then my daughter delivers a new blow: just before New Year—I'll never forget this—Tima and I were planning to spend it at home, as usual no one had invited us anywhere, we went to the Christmas tree market and gathered up a bouquet of the bushiest fan-shaped branches, just like a tree! Then we made some little flags and animals out of coloured paper from old magazines, and at that point Alyona shows up, supposedly to wish us a happy New Year; she'd bought Tima a blue plastic cat of surpassing ugliness but Tima made a great fuss of it, tucked it up in bed, and I didn't tell the poor child that his own mother, completely brazen, had stolen from her own family home two boxes of Christmas tree decorations, leaving us only three. I wept. 
—From The Time: Night, a short novel by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated from the Russian by Sally Laird (Northwestern University Press, 2000). Originally published in Russian in Novy Mir, No. 2, 1992. First published in English by Pantheon Books, New York, and and Virago Press Limited, London. This segment is from page 30.
   

Once, on the train, an Afghan woman who had never seen Afghanistan said to me, "Triumph is possible." Is that a prophecy? I wanted to ask. But my Persian was straight from a beginner’s textbook and she looked, while listening to me, as though she were picking through a wardrobe whose owner had died in a fire. 
—From "A Celebration," a prose poem by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell, The Paris Review, Issue 197 (Summer 2011).  

I have abstained from grief these past days.
Now the rain approaches like a slow train,
summer in its carriage. . . . 
—From "Not in Matter," a poem by James Harmon Clinton, The Decadent Review. 

As I eat my lunch, you talk, with gusto, about hunger. When I complain about my unfashionable clothes, you laugh remembering your wedding—you borrowed a white robe from a nurse to wear as a wedding dress. When I beg for privacy, you ask: "Did I tell you about the day the Bolsheviks came to take the roof off our farmhouse?" Or worse: "Did I tell you about the house where my mother died right after sending my brothers and me to an orphanage?" "Did I tell you about how Uncle Kazik died?" "Did I tell you how the Soviets took my father twice, and since he did return after the first time, I didn't cry a bit when they took him the second time?"
—From "Baba Bronya," a prose poem by Valzhyna Mort, from her collection Music for the Dead and Resurrected (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). This poem appears on pages 52-57 of the hardcover.   

Ann Patchett, Anne Lamott, and Alice Munro

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State of Wonder, a novel by Ann Patchett (Harper, 2011). A surprising, often beautiful book.
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Imperfect Birds, a novel by Anne Lamott (Riverhead Books, 2010).
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Too Much Happiness, a collection of short stories by Alice Munro (first international edition by Vintage Books, 2010; originally published in Canada by Toronto's McClelland & Stewart and then in New York by Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

From Alice Munro's story "Deep-Holes": Sally stumbled along faster than was easy for her, with the diaper bag and the baby Savanna. She couldn't slow down till she had her sons in sight, saw them trotting along taking sidelong looks into the black chambers, still making exaggerated but discreet noises of horror. She was nearly crying with exhaustion and alarm and some familiar sort of seeping rage.

I'd read several of these stories before--they were all from either The New Yorker or Harper's--but most were new to me. "Too Much Happiness," for example, which closes the collection, is about Sophia Kovalevsky, a nineteenth-century mathematician and novelist.