Definitely one of the best stories of this year - of any year

Daniyal Menueddin's (sp?) story "A Spoiled Man" in the "PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories 2010" collection is prototypical of editor Laura Thurman's taste - an exotic setting, a somewhat long story, a story that covers a large span of time and includes back-story material so as to cover an entire life, in other words, a compacted novel, and I have to say that I can see why an editor would choose these stories - they are grander and more ambitious than most published short fiction - and my taste is similar to hers (though oddly the stories I've written or published do not necessarily match her taste - I'd written one story, not published, that writers' group friends said should be expanded into a novel, to which my reaction was, good, let's leave it as a short story then). Menueddin's story is without doubt one of the best of the year, of any year - a true classic - touching on class relations, international relations, cruelty, love, sorrow, and the insensitivity and ignorance of the wealthy who think they're doing good and essentially destroy a man in the process. I suppose it would make a great film, but I hope nobody tries, because it's about perfect as it stands. Has to remind readers of the best of Forster, and not just because of the Asian setting. I've been really impressed by Menueddin's writing, and I hope he keeps at it, though he seems to have so many talents that who knows where he's going? Oddly, the selection from Alice the Great (Munro) in this collection, Some Women, is a bit atypical: here's a writer who often does tell complete life stories in her short fiction, but this piece is about an older woman looking back at an episode from her youth that was epochal in her life - at the very end she references that she's now much older, but we have no idea what she's become other than the author of this piece. A fine story, of course.