The title of Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection Unaccustomed Earth originates from this text’s claim that “My children have had other birthplaces, and…shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.” For 10 points each:
[10h] Name this text in which the narrator describes his inefficient coworkers and monotonous experience working at the title place, where he finds a package of manuscripts written by the surveyor who preceded him.
ANSWER: “The Custom-House” [prompt on, but DO NOT REVEAL, the preface to The Scarlet Letter; prompt on introduction or frame story or prologue in place of “preface”; reject “the first chapter of The Scarlet Letter”]
[10e] “The Custom-House” is the preface to this novel. Bharati Mukherjee’s novel The Holder of the World loosely retells this novel’s protagonist Hester Prynne as the lover of a Hindu raja.
ANSWER: The Scarlet Letter
[10m] A girl who has been confined to gardens her entire life drinks an antidote that kills her at the end of a Hawthorne story set in this country, which also provides the setting of Lahiri’s book In Other Words.
ANSWER: Italy (The story is “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”)
<CM, American Literature>