A collection of nonfiction and fiction pieces that seek to address contemporary moral dilemmas, including but not limited to the hapless, the hopeless, and the helpless. A newly divorced man grapples with nature and estrangement, a woman helps her former lover contemplate suicide, a family copes with the aftermath of breast cancer, a woman travels to the dark side of LA where she watches a porn filmed in her boyfriend's childhood home, and a final story that seeks to reclaim Callahan's relationship with her father that was founded in beekeeping but lost to religion. In each story there is a simultaneous desire and anxiety of closeness; in every story the stare into comedy and tragedy remains relentless. While fundamentally upsetting, these stories aim to charm and ruin in equal measure.

Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1993. / Title from title page screen, viewed February 21, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Ray Lewis White (chair), William Bohn, Irene Brosnahan, Douglas Hesse, Curtis White. Includes bibliographical references and abstract. Also available in print.

The focus of the present research work is the contemporary American short stories that bring up issues of compulsory norm and the conflict between marginalized characters and their environment. This research was based on those short stories that seemed to represent the idea of being "different" in the most complex and multilayered way, and its goal was to unfold new aspects of the conflict between "normal" and "abnormal"/"different". Variations of norm as well as diversity within the marginalized raise a number of questions about the reasons for their inability to coexist peacefully. The close reading and the analysis of the selected stories show that all the conflicts in them, in one way or another, repeat similar patterns and lead to the same root of the problem of misunderstanding, which is fear. To be more precise, all the cases of hate towards "different" characters can be explained by the hater's explicit or implicit fear of death in its various forms: inability to procreate one's own kind, cultural or personal self-identity loss, actual life threat in the form of a reminder of possible physical harm and death. Most often it would be the case where shame and fear of death overlap in a very complex way. In general, the cases of characters' otherness fall into three major groups. The nature of the alienation for each of these groups is described and analyzed in three separate chapters. Prejudice and stereotypes are playing a great role in formation of fears and insecurities which need to be dismantled in order to make peaceful coexistence possible. This work concludes with pointing out the crucial role of taking an approach of representation of various perspectives and diversification of voices in creative writing, academia and media in the context of multicultural society.