Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family...

Tracking the rise and fall of the new American oil boom, My Country No More paints an intimate portrait of a rural North Dakota community in crisis, forced to confront the meaning of progress as they fight for a disappearing way of life.