It’s nice when a short story collection receives the loud and splashy publicity typically reserved for a big novel (and, needless to say, it’s nicer still when the author of that collection is friends with this website), and that’s just what’s happening with Daniyal Mueenuddin’s debut book In Other Rooms, Other Wonders The Contract dvdrip Tenebre release Greedy the movie Ferrari: Victory by Design film

. Washington Post stalwart Michael Dirda comments that the collection, a series of interlocking stories set largely on a feudal farm in the Punjab, “is likely to be the first widely read book by a Pakistani writer.” (In case you needed more evidence for Mueenuddin’s origins, he recently gave a talk at New York’s Asia Society with fellow Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, viewable here.)

And along with being widely read, if the diverse (though almost always positive) critical response is any indication, it will be appreciated for widely different qualities. Amy Rosenberg in Bookforum

is drawn to Mueenuddin’s handling of the servant class in Pakistan: “Mueenuddin’s sympathy lies not with [aging landowner K.K.] Harouni (though a measure of the author’s skill is the subtlety with which he coaxes understanding for the landowner from the reader) but with the workers, managers, and servants who sustain his farm, city mansion, and weekend home and whose lives are destroyed by the failure of the old system.” Dalia Sofer with The New York Times is taken by the treachery and power plays that underlie the many relationships throughout the collection:

Manipulation unifies these stories, running through them as consistently as the Indus River flows south of Punjab. A dance of insincere compliments and favors asked at just the right moment — when the supplicant detects a benevolent mood — is performed by every­one. This bewildering pas de deux is familiar to all but the two American characters, whose ignorance causes grief to themselves and others.

And many have commented on the sheer craftsmanship of the language and the storytelling, including Kristin Chenoweth for Barnes & Noble:

Comparisons have already been made between In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and classics such as Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches and Joyce’s Dubliners. Whether Mueenuddin’s debut, like those volumes, will stand the test of decades remains to be seen, but its vitality and subtlety make it an exciting, essential work for the here and now.

The publicity splash naturally requires that Mueenuddin give interviews and book tours, and you can find plenty of supplemental material about him here, here, and here

. But the author would no doubt love it most if you bought his book.

–Sam Sacks

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Steve Coll, perhaps the best-sourced American reporter on foreign affairs, has an excellent primer on the simmering conflict over Kashmir in the New Yorker. The situation in Pakistan is less stable than most in the West realize. In stepping down last year, Pervez Musharraf handed Pakistan’s new civilian President Asif Zardari (widower of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto) not only the sixty-year Kashmiri conflict in the northeast, but internal unrest that threatens to topple the government.

The violent contest for power and legitimacy between Taliban militants and Pakistan’s government is in many ways a struggle over Pakistan’s national identity – and, particularly, over whether the present government is righteously Islamic enough.

Failure here will torpedo gains anywhere else. India and Pakistan have been conducting quiet negotiations over Kashmir for much of the last decade, but “in the midst of such [an internal] contest, any agreement that made concessions to India would be harder to than ever to sell to the Pakistani public.” The Indian leadership likewise faces pressure from more militant factions to act with force. The struggle for peace reflects

a competition between two schools of radical thought: the millenarian terrorism of jihadi groups and their other supporters; and the less well-known search by sections of the Indian and Pakistani elites for a transformational peace. For both groups, Kashmir is symbolically and ideologically important. It is also, still, a territory of grinding, unfinished war.

And it is a conflict tied intimately to America’s presence in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, built up the Taliban in Afghanistan as a bulwark against Indian influence, just as they supported jihadi forces in Kashmir as proxies in their fight for territory. Weaning them off of their reliance on Islamic militants will take a combination of American pressure (the US gives billions every year in military aid to Pakistan) and a workable solution to the question of Kashmir.

For an idea of the precariousness of Pakistan’s government, see this video from the The New York Times, about the fight between the government and the Taliban for the valley of Swat, a mere 100 miles from the nation’s capitol. For more on related subjects, turn to Zac Marconi’s review of The Great Gamble, about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, from our February 2009 issue. On the wider subject of the so-called “war on terror”: Greg Waldmann’s review of Lee Harris’ The Suicide of Reason, from our October 2007 issue and his review of Michael Scheuer’s Marching Toward Hell, from our April 2008 issue.