Daniyal
Mueenuddin In Other Rooms, Other
Wonders W.W. Norton & Company
Video from the 2009 National
Book Awards Finalist Reading
Photo credit: Cecilie
Brenden
CITATION
One of the best new story writers
in America lives on a farm in Pakistan. A large cast
of characters passes through his pages, giving us a
wonderful sense of the strata of contemporary Pakistan,
and, miraculously, a sharp sense of our own lives. This
extraordinarily gifted short story maker has produced
one of the best books of this year, and promises a great
deal for the future.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Passing from the mannered drawing rooms of Pakistan’s
cities to the harsh mud villages beyond, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s
linked stories describe the interwoven lives of an aging
feudal landowner, his servants and managers, and his
extended family, industrialists who have lost touch
with the land. In the spirit of Joyce’s Dubliners
and Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches,
these stories comprehensively illuminate a world, describing
members of parliament and farm workers, Islamabad society
girls and desperate servant women.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The son of an American mother
and a Pakistani father, Daniyal Mueenuddin was raised
in Pakistan. At thirteen he left his childhood home
for boarding school in the United States, after which
he went on to attend Dartmouth College and Yale Law
School. After graduation he returned to work on his
family’s farm in Pakistan’s southern Punjab,
where he lives today. His stories have appeared in
The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, and The Best
American Short Stories 2008, selected by Salman
Rushdie, and he has been chosen to receive the 2010
PEN/O. Henry Award.
From the story “Nawabdin
Electrician,” published in In Other Rooms,
Other Wonders.
The motorcycle increased
his status, gave him weight, so that people began
calling him “Uncle,” and asking his opinion
on world affairs, about which he knew absolutely nothing.
He could now range further, doing a much wider business.
Best of all, now he could spend every night with his
wife, who had begged to live not on the farm but near
her family in Firoza, where also they could educate
at least the two eldest daughters. A long straight
road ran from the canal headworks near Firoza all
the way to the Indus, through the heart of the K.K.
Harouni lands. The road ran on the bed of an old highway,
built when these lands lay within a princely state.
Some hundred and fifty years ago one of the princes
had ridden that way, going to a wedding or a funeral
in this remote district, felt hot, and ordered that
rosewood trees be planted to shade the passersby.
He forgot that he had given the order within a few
hours, and in a few dozen years he in turn was forgotten,
but these trees still stood, enormous now, some of
them dead and looming without bark, white and leafless.
Nawab would fly down this road on his new machine,
with bags and cloths hanging from every knob and brace,
so that the bike, when he hit a bump, seemed to be
flapping numerous small vestigial wings; and with
his grinning face, as he rolled up to whichever tube
well needed servicing, with his ears almost blown
off, he shone with the speed of his arrival.
From the story “Nawabdin
Electrician,” published in In Other Rooms,
Other Wonders.
