Fiction Commons^™

Heroes, Richard F. Colarco

Night Flight: Online Literary Journal

This is a short story. It should be read for entertainment.

The Dawn Of A New Era, Eyon Mason

Night Flight: Online Literary Journal

The story starts at the election year of present-day America and looks at the outcome of a people that are tired of corrupt government practices and leaders. It branches into a realm of new ideas and true democracy. The story follows the main character Castiel, who is an activist and soon to be leader of the New America. Castiel has one friend who is an activist as well named Ishmael and this story talks about their sudden rise to leadership and the challenges and enemies that follow to.

Targets Of Opportunity, Richard F. Colarco

Night Flight: Online Literary Journal

This is a short story about an Army doctor.

Okay, Kassie H. Bohannon

Honors College Theses

Okay is a minimalistic literary fiction short story cycle that examines the lives of Collin and Charlotte Grearson, two children who grow up with a working class status in a broken home, and their journeys to adulthood as they both respectively cope with their underlying mental health problems. The stories in Okay exemplify how refusal to seek help for a mental health problem, or the lack of support from others even if the illness is communicated, can cause a disconnect between family members, the worsening of the illness itself, and the eventual possibility of fatal conclusions. Okay is composed as …

Drink And The Devil, Richard Clark

The Tuxedo Archives

When he was twenty-eight-year-old the man began to have a recurring nightmare. He was on the London Underground with his wife, a little before Christmas. Lunch at Simpsons on the Strand had been followed by shopping at Harrods and Selfridges. They carried big bags of gifts and tasteless tidbits wrapped in cellophane and colored ribbon. They were happy, not a care in the world. As the train trundled along the tunnel beneath the Thames, the wife said she could hear the sound of rushing water. “Don’t worry,” the man told her, “the train is watertight.” They sat quietly but the …

Zamzaroo, Zarang, And The Rabbit Men, Adan Mulvaney

Conspectus Borealis

This short fiction story is the tale of a grandfather, his rabbit, and his adopted granddaughter. This story was originally inspired when I heard the story of a suicidal rabbit. The rabbit never ran away from loud or scary noises. By ignoring his innate survival instincts, he was essentially inviting death. I found it intriguing how stagnancy can be a form of death. Though the story itself is fiction, some of the events that happened to the characters actually happened to people surrounding me. It is my hope that after reading this story, the reader can appreciate how peculiar and …

The Perfect Bubble, Elizabeth Orwig

The Hilltop Review

No abstract provided.

We Will Plant Birds Of Paradise, Genevieve A. Rheams

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Undertow, Adam Karlin

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A short story collection that explores themes of culture, history, race, movement, stagnancy, and freedom. All stories are connected by elements of water, swimming, rivers, or wetlands. All contain characters seeking to escape their circumstances, with varying degrees of success. For some characters, the arc of their development lays in their movement; for others, it lays in their learning to live with a lack of movement.

The Boys With The Spare Keys, Katelyn Elizabeth Grisham

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

As human beings, we are constantly losing something: our keys, our wallets, our credits cards, or the mate to our favorite pair of socks. But what if you lose something that cannot be replaced, something that will impact your life in a permanent way? This collection looks at what it means to lose something life-altering; our sense of self, our friendships, our planned futures, our grasp on reality. Some things cannot be replaced. From trust fund kids to a dad preparing a Christmas tree for his daughter, this collection will explore the idea of what we can (or cannot) afford …

Vermilion-Stained Offerings, Pooja Desai

Fiction MFA Theses

This thesis is a collection of short stories.

My Unfair Trumpie Closely Encounters 'Julie Andrews', Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

This is a humorous short story about Trump.

Tragedy On Drury Lane, Natalie B. Ngong

Sierpinski’s Square

No abstract provided.

Dear Me, Hannah Patricia Farley

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This collection of fiction includes short stories and a partial novella. A critical introduction provides background on the author’s writing and a theoretical framework as it pertains to the fiction highlighted in this thesis. The works presented explore aspects of genre fiction including magical realism, absurdism, and the bildungsroman. The partial novella relies heavily on epistolary form, confessional style entries, and continuous stream of action. The main characters of the included works serve as focal points which address themes of family life, addiction, mental illness, minority languages, and voice.

La Star De Football, Nicholas Khoury

Honors Program Contracts

A short fable in French that incorporates vocabulary and lessons learned throughout the semester.

You Are What You Write, Yumeng Wang

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This creative thesis consists of six short stories with different lengths and styles. For the introduction, I discuss how my work is influenced by various aspects of cultural background, with examples including writers from Zitkala-Ša and Richard Wright to Celeste Ng. Cultural background is the key to understand most of the characters in the different stories. After the critical introduction, readers will have a general idea of my stories with a sense of how the relationship between different groups of people shape them to act and live under the influence of their cultural backgrounds and environment they were brought up …

Loose Light, Logan Lane

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

My honors project is a 9,600-word collection of two short stories. The first story, Loose Light, is a character-driven narrative about an astronomer who has spent his life chasing an outer space phenomenon he saw as a graduate student and what he does when he rediscovers the phenomenon. The second story, Lost Light, is another character-driven narrative about a young man who, after an automobile accident, begins losing his memories. Both stories examine the perspective of the lost, the obsessed, the isolated, and the angry. In the accompanying self-analysis, I explore how my time as a reporter for The University …

Boys Club, Elizabeth Fiset

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis begins with a critical introduction on setting and its influence on the characters and overall effect on the fictional narrative. I use Lubomir Dolezel’s theory of narrative worlds and modalities, specifically the alethic constraints that come with world building to analyze across literary genres of fiction. I argue that genre has developed into a spectrum rather than having clear cut guidelines per genre specification ranging from realism to high fantasy. After the critical introduction you will find short stories and flash fiction all built within the same story world. Each of the stories contains similar theme of children …

Dinner At Eight, Anastasia M. Berkovich

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This creative thesis is comprised of six short stories of fiction in various styles and lengths, as well as a critical introduction wherein I discuss the various influences on my work, ranging from Charles Baxter and Karen Joy Fowler to Doležel and John Gardner. All of these stories share a theme of family and loss. Each story also grapples in some way with changing times and places. I have endeavored, by using rhyming action, repeating images, and melodrama, to give each story a great sense of emotion, a feeling both specific to the story but connects to the wider reading …

Daffodils: A Completely Unrelated Collection Of Short Stories, Sawyer E.P. Henshaw

Scripps Senior Theses

“Daffodils” is a collection of three fictional short stories without obvious thematic connection, yet all containing tenacious female characters. “The Winner” is told from the unflinching voice of a young wife in her struggle for control within the newfound environment of a Massachusetts boarding school. “The Seers” is a dystopian story, taking place in a world with months of “Sun” and months of dark at a time, intimately describing the effects of this phenomenon upon the civilization. Lastly, “Plastic Flowers” examines the loss of love and comfort within a relationship, depicting the insecurities of young adult life in New York …

Fourth Time’S A Charm, Ardennes Vickery

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

The sources I used to create my short story, Fourth Time’s A Charm, were essential for all aspects of its development. My story concerns the awkward first meeting of King Henry VIII and his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. As with all historical fiction stories, striving for period appropriate details and accurate representations of historical events was crucial. The resources that I was able to access through the UNLV University Libraries not only assisted me throughout my project by streamlining the research process, but proved indispensable for obtaining various primary sources that I may not have been unable to access …

Time Enough, Lb Kovac

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Achieving Relationships, Frederick C. Melancon

Master's Theses

These stories attempt to follow John Gardner’s instruction to create a dream that will engage the reader. Mirroring the goal that an author has to create a relationship with his audience, each story in turn focuses on emotional details that convey the characters’ feelings of isolation or, alternatively, inclusion in their communities. In the first story, a young man tries to recreate his father’s king cake. In the next, a middle school girl fixates on her relationship with her sister. Trying to recapture the memory of a lost daughter, a man searches for the perfect nectar snowball. A mom, then, …

Looker: Stories, George Robert Hargett

Master's Theses

The following stories, completed by the author between August 2013 and February 2015, deal with love, obscurity, isolation, failure, vulnerability and insecurity, looking and losing, the fears tied up in all these, and, once in a while, gaining.

Mix Tape, Michael Davis

Senior Theses

This creative writing thesis contains short stories, a piece of memoir writing, and a screenplay by Michael Davis.

• Grey Giants
• Purple Jasmines
• The Cameraman
• Bubby Rose

Out Of Reach [Short Story], Kathleen Fowler

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Greyhound, 1984, Lisa K. Sandlin

Writer’s Workshop Faculty Publications

In "Greyhound, 1984," fiction writer Lisa Sandlin grabs and holds onto the reader with terse, rhythmic language, unique imagery, and a story that's both unsentimental and poignant.

Dialogue In Fiction, Tracy A. Townsend

The Short Story

This close-reading and discussion-oriented lesson, which takes between sixty and seventy minutes, uses Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” as a model of how dialogue advances plot and develops character in fiction. It is useful in literature classrooms for its emphasis on drawing inferences from text and in creative writing contexts for teaching effective dialogue writing. This lesson is suitable for grades 9-12.

“My Life With My Cell Phone”: Creating A Magical Realist Story, Dan Gleason

The Short Story

In this lesson students are introduced to the basic elements of magical realism, a genre that combines fantastical events with the mundane normalcy of life. Students examine Octavio Paz’s short story “My Life with the Wave” as an example of the genre. In the story, the narrator travels to the ocean and falls in love with a wave, whom he bottles and takes home with him; the two go on to both cherish each other and fight terribly. After discussing the story, students create, in groups, plot sketches for their own adaptations. Students might imagine relationships with cell phones, the …

Compulse, Candise W. Henson

Student Publications

A short short story that looks at the details of a strange marriage between a minister with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and his pregnant wife as they attempt to exorcise five girls at a backwoods church camp.