Daniyal Mueenuddin

reading from
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
published by W.W. Norton

reading from
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
published by W.W. Norton
A major literary debut that explores class, culture, power, and desire among the ruling and servant classes of Pakistan.
In the spirit of Joyce's Dubliners and Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches, Daniyal Mueenuddin's collection of linked stories illuminates a place and a people through an examination of the entwined lives of landowners and their retainers on the Gurmani family farm in the countryside outside of Lahore, Pakistan. An aging feudal landlord's household staff, the villagers who depend on his favor, and a network of relations near and far who have sought their fortune in the cities confront the advantages and constraints of station, the dissolution of old ways, and the shock of change. Mueenuddin bares-at times humorously, at times tragically-the complexities of Pakistani class and culture and presents a vivid picture of a time and a place, of the old powers and the new, as the Pakistani feudal order is undermined and transformed.
Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and elsewhere, spent his early childhood in Pakistan and then lived in the United States. After graduating from Dartmouth College, he returned to Pakistan and lived there for seven years on his father's farm in southern Punjab. Although he didn't begin writing fiction until much later, his experience during those years on the farm form the basis of his short stories. He and his wife live on, and manage a farm in Khanpur, Pakistan.