Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Embrace The Moon, Natalie J. Havlina

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

EMBRACE THE MOON is a collection of six stories that explore how people respond when faced with the impossible. A young woman welcomes a visit from her recently-deceased grandfather in the title story, while the narrator of “A Unicorn in Paris” dismisses the magical creature as a side effect of heartbreak. Like the dark power in Truman Capote’s “Master Misery,” the reality of the ghost and the unicorn remains ambiguous. In other stories, the uncanny is dangerously real, as in Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove. “The Norban Birds of the Count Bartello-Sauvigny” feast on the women they charm …

Enforcer Blues, Jessica Borsi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The science fiction novel ENFORCER BLUES follows cyborg and mob enforcer Gregory Rikard as he becomes involved with a conspiracy on Mars.

Ex-soldier and cyborg Gregory Rikard and his partner Platina work unwillingly for a crime syndicate until a charismatic stranger offers them the chance to rebel in the hope of claiming a better life. But when Rikard steals a dangerous prototype for the rebellion, he’ll be forced to choose between his own interests, the future of Mars, and a single innocent life.

Like Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, ENFORCER BLUES explores the relationship between …

Kaleidoscope: Essays On Color, Chloe C. Firetto-Toomey Ms

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A KALEIDOSCOPE: ESSAYS ON COLOR is a collection of ruminative lyric essays that seeks to plumb the questions How did we get here? following the inauguration of the 45th President of the United States. The speaker’s external probing of the present zeitgeist is juxtaposed with personal narrative; the speaker’s ongoing crisis of both geographical and ideological citizenship. Significant themes include truth, consequence, migration, and escape.

The literary elements of A KALEIDOSCOPE are informed by Joan Didion’s THE WHITE ALBUM as she tracks political and personal events of the 1960s using a journalistic approach. BLUETS by Maggie Nelson informs the obsessive …

Apparent Magnitude, Diana Anaya

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

APPARENT MAGNITUDE is a collection of lyric essays that explores family relationships, the Cuban-American immigrant experience, coming-of-age, and sexual trauma through the dual lenses of science and myth. This collection uses experimental forms, playing with the page. The experiences of an immigrant Cuban family are recounted through extended metaphors of celestial bodies, fairy tales, fables, and myths.

The literary influences of APPARENT MAGNITUDE include Rebecca McClanahan’s lyric essay, “Interstellar,” as well as A SMALL PLACE by Jamaica Kincaid. McClanahan’s use of scientific language and the metaphor of celestial bodies informs the way this collection approaches autobiographical experience. Kincaid’s prose style …

The Dancing Policeman And Other Stories, Satyaki Kanjilal

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Dancing Policeman and Other Stories, a collection of short stories set in India and the United States, looks at ordinary people facing challenges in societies undergoing economic and social change.

Some have historical settings. In “Faithful Naren,” a young man learns the complex political realities of British rule in early 20^th century Natihati, West Bengal, while in the same town in the 1960s, a teenager deals with injustice in “Sabotage.”

Others take place in a present where past practices persist. "Shit Gibbon" centers on a store clerk driven to gambling rather than sacrifice his son's future. In “Road …

Trying To Save The Family: A Memoir, Roberto J. Manzano

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

TRYING TO SAVE THE FAMILY: A MEMOIR uses incomplete and contradictory versions of single incidents and views of character that echo across time and place to assemble a narrative portrait of three generations. It looks at a family’s simultaneity of experience in Havana, leaving versus staying, and in Miami, adjusting versus failing to. The narrator employs interviews, photos, and family documents to investigate and interpret a complex inheritance. Like Joan Didion's Miami, this memoir focuses on history's patterns and repetitions. It starts in the fifties and ends in the present, as the narrator searches his family’s past to understand …

Heat Waves, Edward Charles Krzeminski

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

HEAT WAVES is a collection of confessional poetry exploring themes of masculinity, maturation, loss, consumerism, the growing disparity between the speaker and his family, and American identity. The collection is divided into three sections. The poems in the first section deal with childhood, friendship, and coming of age in Southwest Florida. The second section deals with family and considers the contrast between the beliefs, educational backgrounds, and career of the speaker’s father and the speaker himself. The final section explores 21^st century America and its issues including environmental damage, consumerism, and alienation.