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Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
Literary Echoes: Short Story Analyses by Fiza Pathan is an educational study of short fiction that teaches readers how to examine the details authors put into their stories. Pathan considers Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” by looking at the village ritual as a social practice accepted by ordinary people. O. Henry’s “A Bird of Bagdad” gives her a different route to interpretation, with Margrave Quigg’s restaurant card serving as the key to the unusual riddle surrounding Simmons. Anton Chekhov’s “A Day in the Country” moves the discussion to rural Russia, where Pathan connects Terenty’s lessons about nature to religious references within the story. Each analysis is followed by discussion questions that send readers back into the text, making the book suitable for guided literary study in classrooms as well as independent learning.
Fiza Pathan’s Literary Echoes: Short Story Analyses is fascinating, and I think Pathan has a real gift for teaching readers how to look closely at fiction. I especially enjoyed how she can take one small detail and open a much larger discussion from it. In Yukio Mishima’s “Three Million Yen,” the amusement park gives Pathan a way into postwar Japanese consumer culture. Her discussion of Old Bapu estimating his age from the 1905 Kangra earthquake is another wonderful example of how she links fiction to history. The discussion questions are one of the book’s strongest educational features. One question on Joanne Harris’s “The Toymaker and His Wife” asks how the wife remaining unnamed supports Harris’s feminist argument after the toymaker’s craft receives a detailed description. Well written, exceptionally formatted, and exhaustively researched, teachers and literature students who are looking for the ultimate extensive guide will appreciate this.
