This story by Bharati Mukherjee explores the cultural transformation that occurs when the wife of an Indian textile executive moves to New York on a two-year scholarship to complete a doctoral degree. The freedom she experiences when no longer bound by the traditions and strict social conventions of her homeland allows her to find her identity. The change is emphasized as she accompanies her husband around the city during a short visit partway through the course, and raises the question of how she will fare upon return to India. Themes include identity, communication, culture clash, gender roles, liberation. More…
The School Play
This Gary Soto story is about facing fear. The protagonist is scared of forgetting his only line in his sixth-grade play. In addition to worrying about being laughed at, another student has threatened to “bury his face in the ground” if he messes up. The play is about the infamous Donner Party. The fear theme is supported in its concluding words: You gotta suck it up (endure hardship) in bad times. Interestingly, although intended to suggest that the starving travelers should have been stronger in resisting cannibalism, this expression could also be used to justify eating dead bodies to survive? More…
Roses, Rhododendron
This enchanting story by Alice Adams is about friendship, love (for people and places), and marriage. The narrator recalls how, after she and her mother moved from Boston to North Carolina, a lifelong friendship developed after she fell permanently in love with a house, with a family of three people and with an area of countryside. She forms a strong bond with each member of the family, and later learns that their shared fondness for her may have been the only thing that kept them together. Themes include friendship, mother-daughter relationships, marriage, city vs. country living, the beauty of nature. More…
Priscilla and the Wimps
In addition to this being Richard Peck’s first young adult story, it is one of his most popular. This is undoubtedly because it not only follows the age-old success formula of a victorious underdog, but does so in the context of humiliating a school bully. Another plus is that the denouement is left to the reader’s imagination. Does Pricilla come back later in the day to release Monk? Do her or Melvin’s parents phone the school and arrange for the locker to be opened? Or do they come back in a week’s time and find that Monk is an ice-block? More…
A Distant Episode
In this story by Paul Bowles a Moroccan café worker lures a patronizing Western linguist to a quarry where he is kidnapped by a feared nomadic tribe. He is beaten, has his tongue cut out, and over the next year dehumanized by having to perform clown-like antics to entertain the tribe during their travels. The constant indignity breaks down his reasoning which, despite a moment of awareness when they sell him to another tribe, ends in insanity and a mad rush into the night. Themes include arrogance, cultural naivety, cruelty, dehumanization, (loss of) identity, madness. More…