Creative Writing Commons^™

The Mango Snores, Michael S. Garcia

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

THE MANGO SNORES

by

Michael S. Garcia

Florida International University, 2021

Miami, Florida

Professor John Dufresne, Major Professor

Set in Miami at the start of the twenty-first century, THE MANGO SNORES is a seriocomic crime novel chronicling a week in the life of Sam Espada, Cuban-American writing professor and author of the Mango series of detective fiction. Reeling from the sudden dissolution of his marriage and the abject failure of his latest book, Sam finds himself embroiled in a plot right out of one of his novels when his newest pupil, private investigator Leonard Cobb, is …

Split At The Root, Robert S. Gryder

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Influenced by— and sometimes in conversation with— diverse literary voices such as Dorothy Allision (BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA), Harry Crews (A CHILDHOOD), and Mark Doty (FIREBIRD), SPLIT AT THE ROOT is a literary bildungsroman told primarily in the narrative mode. The memoir traces the narrator’s volatile beginnings in the trailer parks of rural South Carolina in the 1980s to the day he accepted, sight unseen, an offer of admission to Yale University, boarding a plane in 1993 for the first time in his life. This memoir explores the narrator’s quest for agency, deploying the essayist mode to interrogate along the …