Daniyal Mueenuddin

Related Content

• The Weekly Wire: This Week's Recommended Events
  March 28, 2012
• The Weekly Wire: This Week's Recommended Events
  April 11, 2012
• SIFF Week 2: 20 New Picks & Pans
  May 23, 2012
• Comment of the Day: People are Annoying, But Don't Knock Cuban's Commercials
  April 9, 2012
• SIFF: Week 1 Picks & Pans
  May 16, 2012

More About

• Daniyal Mueenuddin
• Al Qaeda
• Lahore
• War and Conflict
• Terrorism

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Imagine Pakistan in the decades before 9/11 and Al Qaeda, post-colonial and nearly feudal in the divide between rich and poor, its past wealth seeping like water into the sand. One landowner divides his time between Lahore and his various farms out in rural Punjab. Around him revolve a constellation of spurned wives, supplicant in-laws, thieving property managers, adulterous servants, heroin addicts, bandits, and honest peasants. In his excellent collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Norton, $23.95), the Western-educated Daniyal Mueenuddin allows major characters to die in one story, then loops back years in another to let them observe from the periphery. Writing with strict economy, he preserves resources. Just as land and money shift from one party to the next over the years, Mueenuddin reallocates the narrative among his cast, as their fortunes rise and fall. Some stories you may recall from The New Yorker. In all of them, love and prosperity are like the crops—flourishing in one season, gone the next. BRIAN MILLER
Thu., March 5, 7:30 p.m., 2009