“The fences insured against a time when a scavenger in Gautam Nagar might learn that a shot of rare Scotch consumed in ten minutes at the Sheraton’s ITC Maratha cost exactly as much as he earned in seven hundred fourteen-hour days picking up aluminum cans and used tampon applicators, and find that information too much to bear.”

Why it's great: The sentence is a story in itself. It creates a texture landscape in the reader’s mind (taste that rare scotch, sharp and warm in your throat; then feel the ache in your lower spine, and your own gathering revulsion, as you hunch into your 14th hour of trash-picking). But more incredibly, it distills one of the humanity’s most pressing and intractable problems – the problem of global inequality – into a short burst of exquisite detail. There is a fence across the whole world. On one side is the scotch and on the other is the tampon applicator. And the tension between the two sides is ever mounting.