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The Hook: Stories, Jenny Miranda Lederer
The Hook: Stories, Jenny Miranda Lederer
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The nine pieces of short fiction in this collection feature a group ofcharacters in transition: some caught between the easy magic of youth and the often painful discovery of complexity, others between deliberate stasis and queasy action. Their decisions in these moments will prove pivotal, with ramifications that echo for the remainder of their lives. The settings of these stories range the length of the East Coast from New Hampshire to Florida, often visiting places where the border between the wild and the tame becomes blurred: a campground, a rural farmhouse, a stretch of moonlit beach with the boundless ocean …
After The Burning: Excerpts And Stories, Pamala Rachel Ewing
After The Burning: Excerpts And Stories, Pamala Rachel Ewing
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection features short stories and two novel excerpts all dealing with flawed characters struggling to build and maintain meaningful connections with the people around them. Some of these characters fail while others succeed, although this success often takes a different form than the character anticipated. The stories take place in Mississippi and Tennessee and are infused with the troubled relationship with the past that so often marks literature set in the American south. While the individual pieces deal with a wide variety of situations and circumstances, the collection is united by a pervasive theme of loneliness, exploring the danger …
The Incredible Tale Of Johanna, The Blessed Listener., Jared Andrew Beek 1986-
The Incredible Tale Of Johanna, The Blessed Listener., Jared Andrew Beek 1986-
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In this novella, a young girl wakes to discover she has lost her voice and that people can no longer hold their secrets back from her. Tasked with offering them absolution through listening, she must also deal with the increasing toll bearing these secrets places on her. An exploration of the difficulties that emerge in navigating social relationships and difficult situations on the cusp of adulthood, this novella seeks to incorporate elements of magical realism and fairy tale to create afantastical bildungsroman that also pays homage to the work of Gabriel Garda Marquez.
The Year Of The Myrrhbearers, Sarah Grace Romer
The Year Of The Myrrhbearers, Sarah Grace Romer
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This novel examines the lives of the three Creighton women, Joanna, Bethany, and Maggie, during the year following Jeremiah Creighton's death. While grieving the loss of a husband and father, each woman also faces the questions regarding the suspicious circumstances of Jeremiah Creighton's fatal car accident. Joanna knows and learns secrets about her husband which she hides from her daughters for fear of the blame and guilt that will come. Bethany wants to fix her families problems by trying for children with her husband, Simon, in an attempt to turn pain into hope. Maggie avoids the adult responsibilites that her …
The First Thing To Go, Ashley Leigh Paige
The First Thing To Go, Ashley Leigh Paige
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection of loosely linked short stories predominately features young women at moments of change and transformation, who often feel lost and alienated from their homes, relationships and, often, their own bodies. Some of the young women struggle to determine if they have made the wisest decisions while others struggle to find the best solution to their situation. The stories take place in South Carolina, Boston, southwest Virginia, and central Alabama, with several characters showing up in multiple locales, exploring and illuminating feelings of displacement, or physical alienation. Relationships and connections, or the lack thereof, also play a large part …
Renovations And Other Stories, Amanda Rene Lager
Renovations And Other Stories, Amanda Rene Lager
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Renovations and Other Stories is a linked collection of ten fiction stories that examines the ways by which women renew or restore themselves. The collection is set in the imaginary city of St. Clair, South Carolina, a town balancing historical accuracy with the sensational tourist industry; Carolinians who trace their ancestries back to the American Revolution with suburban newcomers; and the notion of cherishing the past with moving forward. Many of the characters struggle with identity, whether it is regional or feminine individuality. The protagonists must challenge self-image when faced with situations that make them reconsider their places in their …
Hidden Variable, Heather Harms
Hidden Variable, Heather Harms
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Hidden Variable is a novel that blends linear storytelling with the novel-in-stories form. It poses questions about the nature of identity as well as the feasibility of personal power, particularly with respect to disorders of the mind. Darla Pierson, the novel’s protagonist, is a woman in crisis. She is steeped in selfloathing brought on by the knowledge that she has, in effect, become her dead father—a genius with an epic libido, habitually using and discarding people. Her father has another habit that Darla doesn’t share: being struck by lightning. After the second strike kills him, Darla makes a conscious attempt …
Stuffmobile: A Novella, Ted Greenberg
Stuffmobile: A Novella, Ted Greenberg
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The leitmotif of Stuffmobile, a modern day Florida-based novella, is that of relational healing: a son with his father, ex-lovers with one another, and, even more challenging perhaps, a son making peace with his dead mother. New beginnings are explored, both as resurrection of long dead feelings and as starting afresh after loss. A husband finds distraction in a covert project after his wife’s death, so much so that his preoccupied isolation worries his two adult children. The son comes to investigate, and his malfunctioning car leads to a reunion and the beginnings of reconciliation. Hours later, an accident nearly …
Trade Secrets, Rachel Kolman
Trade Secrets, Rachel Kolman
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Trade Secrets is a collection of fourteen short stories that explores characters falling in and out of relationships and coping in unusual and even comedic ways. These characters are often obsessive and do not trust one another. They think life is funny, and discover that love is funny, and yeah, sex can be funny too. They don’t feel the right things when they’re supposed to. They find love, and lose love. They find hope, and lose hope. They escape sometimes, but more often are unable to go anywhere. These stories consider relationships through the disconnection between reality and fantasy, exploring …
The Boys' Republic, Jonas Mueller
The Boys' Republic, Jonas Mueller
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The young men in The Boys’ Republic live in a world that is continually falling apart. Their houses collapse into sinkholes, forest fires carve out chunks of their towns, plague spreads through their communes, the money runs out on the construction project where they work. This decay mirrors their own collapsing identities, as they are forced to question their mastery of nature, their nostalgia for their youth, their relationships with others, and the value of masculinity itself. Drawing on the work of writers like Dennis Cooper, Flannery O’Connor, and Benjamin Percy, The Boys’ Republic depicts men in the midst of …
Escape Artist, Alejandro Mujica
Escape Artist, Alejandro Mujica
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
My thesis, Escape Artist, is a composite novel written as a fictitious memoir, similar in style to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, that describes my experiences between the years 2001 and 2011. During that time I went through Marine Corps Boot Camp, became a military police officer, patrolled Yuma, AZ, was sent to Iraq for a sevenmonth tour as a security detail just before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and made it back home four years later. The novel also looks into my struggles with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms, how they affected the people around me, and what …
Big Exit, Jordan Edward William Turner
Big Exit, Jordan Edward William Turner
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Big Exit is a novella which chronicles the dialogic interactions of a series of narrator-protagonists from Vancouver, each using first-person points of view. This multi-voiced narrative showcases the often dysfunctional lifestyles of a small group of youths from the lower socio-economic group. The narrative structure rotates irregularly through the characters' perspectives and features spatiotemporal jumps to reflect the psychic dissarray of the community and the deeper psychological fragmentation of Luke, a character diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The juxtapositions of these differing narrative perspectives generate ironies that are not evident to the narrator-protagonists, but are apparent to readers as they move …
Field Guide To Kleptoparasitism, Braydon Beaulieu
Field Guide To Kleptoparasitism, Braydon Beaulieu
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Field Guide to Kleptoparasitism is a collection of episodic fictions centring on a protagonist, Tony Gordon, who perceives himself as both human and ant. Tony's situation within the liminal space between human and nonhuman positions Field Guide to Kleptoparasitism in the absurdist tradition. The stories use various styles, formats, and lengths - mimicking the frenetic movements of insects within their structure - in order to explore nihilism and meaninglessness, as well as the importance of self-acceptance. Field Guide to Kleptoparasitism depicts a character that self-actualizes because of his unique metamorphoses and faults. The stories' focus on individualism serves to forward …
Wild & Wonderful: A Collection Of Stories, Thomas Bennitt
Wild & Wonderful: A Collection Of Stories, Thomas Bennitt
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
My thesis is a collection of literary short stories, many of which spring from my life experiences: people I've known, places I lived, jobs I worked, or subjects I have researched. Some stories are more "realistic," where landscape and geography—often West Virginia, or my native Pennsylvania—is an essential part of the narrative. Other stories are more experimental, blending realism with other styles like satire, metafiction, and historical fiction. Yet the narrators in these stories share a comtrait: they are somehow isolated, alienated, or marginalized. Some are physically confined—a lobsterman who works alone on his boat, coal miners working underground, office …