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"?

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.

When we started commissioning these stories we didn't ask for stories about the day itself – in the years since, we've already heard quite a bit from New York. This time, 10 years on, we wanted to trace the ripples as they headed further outwards.

To that end, we've assembled a set of six stories which we'll be publishing on the site this week, criss-crossing the world from San Francisco to Port Harcourt, from London to a farm in Oregon. Geoff Dyer opens the series with a story that opens on the morning of the attacks, but on the other side of the continent. Kamila Shamsie tackles the question of whether there is "something singular – something exceptional – about suffering when it happened to Americans" with a story set during a power cut in Karachi. Helon Habila measures the distances between Lagos and Washington DC, while Laila Lalami finds tremors in Baghdad reaching all the way to Bay City. Rob Magnuson Smith traces the effects of war and financial crisis back to the American west, and finally Will Self looks to the future with a story examining how technology has complicated our relationship with reality.