Fiction to Mark the Anniversary

Ten years later, media outlets and publishers are remembering the day in different ways. It’s not an easy thing to do. As the Guardian says:

How do you mark an anniversary like 9/11? How do you examine what has changed and what has not in the 10 years since destruction was visited on New York and Washington out of a clear, blue sky? How do you reflect on the lives lost and the lies told in the course of what Pankaj Mishra calls our “low, dishonest decade”?

Like other high profile daily newspapers, the Guardian has chronicled the decade but, as they point out, reportage is not the only way to look at things:

Over the last 10 years, this newspaper has charted the shock, the reverberations and the legacy of those events, but the effect on our imagination – on how we perceive the world – is perhaps as important to determine. Here on the books desk, we felt an attempt should be made through fiction.

The attempt takes our breath away. Works of short fiction from half a dozen writers: Geoff Dyer, Kamila Shamsie, Helon Habila, Laila Lalami, Rob Magnuson Smith and Will Self share, not stories of the day itself, but 10 years on, tracing “the ripples as they headed further outwards.”

You can find the stories here.