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).

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin

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In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W.W. Norton, 2009) is Daniyal Mueenuddin's debut collection, a set of eight linked stories set mainly in Pakistan. Among other things, the book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award finalist, and a New York Times bestseller.

This is a pretty phenomenal collection overall, and it is difficult to single out individual pieces, but my favorite stories were the bookends: "Nawabdin Electrician" and "A Spoiled Man."

He flourished on a signature capability, a technique for cheating the electric company by slowing down the revolutions of electric meters, so cunningly done that his customers could specify to the hundred-rupee note the desired monthly savings.
--From "Nawabdin Electrician," pp. 13-28 in the paperback version, originally published in The New Yorker (August 27, 2007) and later in Best American Short Stories 2008.

There he stood at the stone gateway of the Harounis' weekend home above Islamabad, a small bowlegged man with a lopsided battered face. When the American wife's car drove up, turning off the Murree road, Rezak saluted, eyes straight ahead, not looking at her.
--From "A Spoiled Man," pp. 221-247, originally published in The New Yorker (September 15, 2008).

(If I absolutely had to choose a third, it would be "Our Lady of Paris," pp. 143-168, originally from Zoetrope: All Story, Volume 10, Number 3 (Fall 2006). Sohail and Helen had begun dating two years earlier, at Yale, where she was an undergraduate and he at the law school. After graduating the previous summer he had returned to his home in Pakistan, while she completed her senior year.)

However, the collection is really more than the sum of its parts. "A Spoiled Man" is incredible on its own, but every bit of the story, even of the title, is more nuanced and meaningful when read with the other stories. It was, I thought, a perfect ending to the book.