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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What was Cyrus’s college major?

2. What medical student does Cyrus harangue?

3. Which of the following does Cyrus quote at Gabe?

4. How does the novel gloss the term “palliative”?

5. Which of the following spirits does Ali favor?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Cyrus’s mother know she is pregnant with him?

2. What is meant in the novel by Iranian ugliness?

3. What is the nature of Orkideh’s final installation?

4. For what does Lisa Simpson rebuke Cyrus’s mother?

5. What does Cyrus want most when God speaks back to him after 27 years?

6. How had Ali tried to stop Cyrus sucking his thumb?

7. Why is there a bounty for Cyrus’s mother?

8. In the novel, what is “good-person drag” (13)?

9. What function does a whiskey bottle serve for Cyrus?

10. Why does Cyrus find American hookah bars suspect?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

To what other writer’s work in your experience does Akbar’s seem most similar? What makes the writers similar? What differentiates them? Overall, which do you regard as doing better at the craft of writing, and why?

Essay Topic 2

Conversely, given demonstrated efforts toward censorship in a number of countries, what would likely prompt bans of Martyr!? By which groups? Why?

Essay Topic 3

A lack of formal sectional division in the novel obliges a fairly arbitrary breakdown of the text for purposes of study and discussion. How might the novel be sectioned off other than it currently is? Why might those divisions be appropriate, based on the text and its contexts of composition and reception?

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