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Lahiri's first story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer and earned her a devoted audience. It also set the bar sky-high for any stories that might follow. Somehow, with her second collection, It's a quirk of modern fiction that a lot of the people who read it work in offices, but very few of the people in it do. As Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End did last year, Personal Days takes a step toward correcting the imbalance. Set within the confines of a nameless, failing white-, it chronicles the company's increasingly intense, intricate office culture, which gets more and more ingrown and self-referential and radioactive with each layoff. "It's possible we can't stand each other," says the novel's first-person-plural narrator, "but at this point we're helpless Unaccustomed Earth, she clears it. Lahiri finely tuned, hypnotically even sentences about Bengali families finding their way in America — but she stretches out, literally, into longer, more complex narratives. The title story and the masterful "Hell-Heaven" establish themes of quietly splintering families and thwarted passion; from there the collection builds in intensity to the triptych "Hema and Kaushik," whose final installment brings together two star-crossed lovers, then cruelly tears them apart.