We find ourselves at a unique place in American history: language is losing its value; decency--or "political correctness"--is becoming taboo; and our future is legislated by those who feel they have been left behind. The stories in Animals Coupling don't attempt to explain contemporary America, but they do attempt to demonstrate (through language, character, style, and circumstance) an expressive rendering of what it looks and feels like to live in the here and now. There is a sense of detachment threading through these works, along with absurdity, loneliness, humor and anomie. But though a minor key may ring loudest, Animals Coupling ultimately, is an exploration of humanity, and hope.

In this collection, the typical and the peculiar collide with the necessary and familiar. Where life, love, and loss, are random quantum elements that may or may not hold the universe together. Some of these stories explore characters that are a bit off, a tad quirky, underdogs trying to find something to hold on to. From musing about the atomic bomb and Hubba Bubba gum, to jogging at the speed of a particle in the Hadron accelerator, or ruminating on the awesome power of the sit-com, to taking a selfie with co-workers in the dark, to what bored kids do to preserve memories, this collection connects the absurd and the mundane, the universal and particular. These stories deal with choices and events that have the potential to change lives and shape character. And whether it's breaking the record for highest jump in a mattress outfit, longing for meatballs, what the downtown bus hub can teach, secret tattoos, cutting off your pinkie to save a relationship, or whales on the high sea, this collection oscillates between the random and the significant in order to enlighten or at least to entertain.

The Nature of Things is a collection of stories and a preface that examine character motivation. The author is concerned with unexpected reactions and surprising outcomes. The stories are independent of each other and involve a wide range of characters.

Deeply concerned with body politics, sexual slavery, identity, and technology, this work takes a serious and brutally honest route through the close perspectives of those living it moment by moment. With influences from science fiction, horror, weird, and literary fiction, the untitled novel blends genres for a disturbing account. This novel also plays with constraints in the spirit of many constraint-based writing movements, without the inclusion of names, few identifying markers, and in publication the removal of title, chapter numbers, page numbers, and author name.

The following is a collection of six short stories written between 2014 and 2016. While the short stories are not connected, they tend to grapple with issues of grief and belonging. Characters who struggle to name their feelings, to inhabit them, and yet feel them nonetheless, populate these pages. There is also a theme of fantastical bodies in some of the stories--women who levitate and little boys who suffer heart problems when they feel too much joy. The interplay between emotion and physical ailment is exaggerated and dramatized in these instances.

Anatomy of Loss contains a foreword, which discusses the place of autobiography in fiction, and five original short stories.

My thesis consists of a novel in stories, each taking place in or around the Brooklyn Art Institute. My characters fall along a spectrum of artistic failure, whether because they have lost touch with both their former successes and their former selves, or because they are unable to reach the upper echelons of the artistic community. The stories themselves are a testament both to failure and to the dreams and desires that lead to it, and ultimately ask the reader whether it is better to lead a life of comfortable contentment or to fail gloriously.

Pulling Tangled Strings: "The Puppeteer" and Other Stories is a collection of stories with strong thematic and emotional connections that includes an opening preface describing the process used when writing the stories. Each of the stories is united by a main character that desperately wants to gain control of his environment. From a character acting out a classic revenge tale on his friend to a comatose teenager victimized by an ambiguous tragedy, these are characters who have been put into difficult life situations and need to feel like they are pulling the strings in their lives again. In all cases, however, the characters come to find that control does not come easily and that the motivations for their behavior are never clear cut, even to themselves.

The following manuscript is a collection of eight short stories that center on the theme of how stories and storytelling, in all their different forms, fill our lives. In one story a girl that lives in other people's houses, longs to tell her story, while in another story a girl struggles with a secret her grandmother leaves behind as she tries to reconstruct her grandmother's story. Some stories use magical and fairy tale-like elements, which work as allusions in the stories and echo the events happening in characters' lives. Another theme present in the collection is that of family and how familial relationships affect identity and self-discovery. In one story, a wildfire allows the stories of different generations to be told, while a widow builds a family out of the aftermath of her husband's death in a different story. / by Khristian Mecom. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web. FboU

The works of creative writing which culminate in this thesis explore themes of everyday trauma, the gendered body as rendered in writing, and writing as propelled by the aural senses above factors such as logic and plot. Dysphoria of identity through gendered, geographical, and institutional means pervades each work in instances that range from the subtle to the all-consuming. Rhythm and intuition bond at the sentence level in each work, rendering a wildness to the pages. Moved by sensation rather than a drive to make something abundantly clear, the revelations of reading arrive at a level of the associative, the dreamy, and the sound of certain syllables and words as juxtaposed with deliberation posing as spontaneity. Grappling with a simultaneous urge to assimilate and to reject societal and geographical cultural norms, there is a fraught tension and a charged friction to the entire thesis herein.