Environmental holocaust has driven four people inside of a cave: an elder, holder of stories, a young man poised to assume primacy, a pregnant woman, a child. To escape the desperation of their waning food, water, and health, they tell stories about the past around a diminishing fire. Each character's story draws from a long oral tradition and describes the end of days as a collage of creation myths and historic artifact.

After the death of his father, Joshua Klein drops out of college and moves to Chicago. Alone in the city and with nothing of consequence to do, he attempts to justify to himself the ways of God, the sense of an early death and what is the good to do in life. In this excerpt of Time Spent Away, Joshua seeks out the hidden aspects of the city and his spirit. Guided by his father's Bible and the formative texts of his undergraduate coursework, he sets out to complete his own education. During a tour of The Auditorium Building Joshua meets Felix Servo, a preserver of historic landmarks and an architectural enthusiast, who will show Joshua the city heights in a new way. When he explores the depths, Joshua meets Roland Charles, a self-proclaimed actor whose true use of time eludes Joshua and will jeopardize his peaceful search for meaning. Told from the perspective of a timid though curious young man, Time Spent Away engages with architecture, literature and love; Louis Sullivan, the Western Cannon and the person of Jesus Christ; preservation, destruction and the fine line between both to present a heart-felt account of self-discovery.

Masters of Art / In this dissertation, the author examines the historical novel Manly pursuits (1999), by Ann Harries. The novel deals with the late nineteenth century in Oxford, England, and inparticular the year 1899 in Cape Town. The focus of the novel is on Cecil John Rhodes and his entourage, and their obsession with empire, which culminates in the South African war in 1900. Featured characters include Chamberlain, Jameson, Kipling, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dodgson, John Ruskin and Olive Schreiner. Harries novel is interpreted as showing resistance to the Victorian society which is the framework which is seen to developed the class and gender-based valued and imperialist thinking of Rhodes and his following. as such the novel is showing resstance to imperialist thinking, the Anglo-Boer war, apartheid and all the resulting legacies for South Africa. / South Africa

A woman wakes up on the beach with no memory of who she is or where she is from. After walking through the woods and stumbling across a series of strange characters, she meets an astronomer and together they embark upon a journey to track down a lead on her identity. A surreal road trip ensues, taking us from the desert of the US Southwest, to the bottom of the sea, to the furthest reaches of the galaxy.

Canary is a novel.

Children find decomposing bodies on a beach. A girl becomes a ghost and finds someone. A dog dies but its owner is out of his mind and eating waffles. Sheep are a perfect species. A woman experiences a pregnancy that is out of this world! A raccoon dies and you watch its body break down. A father does his best fathering. You take a textual road-trip tour of America’s oldest hobby. A trauma is slowed down, picked apart. A soupfin shark is dissected and you watch. A homestead becomesa ghost town in rural Oregon. Joseph Beuys is an artist. A sister falls in love with an object, has a difference of opinion with her sister.

This comic romantic novel engages the question of how the Christianity of the southern, fundamentalist world of the Texas bible belt, finding its primary cultural assumptions about human existence challenged by the more confusing elements of a modern sensibility, a sensibility over-laden with strange-attractors, mechanistic psychologies, relativistic physics and ethics, evolutionary premises, newly proclaimed rights and freedoms, a deterioration in cultural political naivete, and the advent of an increasingly incomprehensible set of technologies, can survive. The "central" character is a young, slightly deformed man raised by his ostensibly "Christian" grandparents who, through a rather odd set of legal circumstances and physical events, not only become wealthy, but somewhat powerful in their immediate community. He finds himself involved with a young woman, raised in an equally "Christian" household, but, as is true of any romantic plot, the relationship between the two is destined, by virtue of circumstance and the meddling of other characters, to struggle and mishap. In the end, the text, in its own fashion, asserts that the Christian impulse can survive the modern era by virtue of one of its central tenets: faith, in the Christian world, is very much the same as life itself, a process of waiting and expecting. Its greatest threat, rather than something intrinsic to the modern period, is perhaps that of the dogmatism and misunderstanding of the characters who most loudly proclaim it to others.

The intent of this project is to study the use of multiple narrators who occupy the same space over a spread of time. While the subject matter has been one of intense study over the years, the approach to implore this technique of fiction has opened the characters, plot, and story to greater exploration.

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.

Inspired heavily by the Virginia Woolf's novel, The Waves, Dirty Girls tells the story of four girls coming of age in coastal Texas. Told through interior monologues, Dirty Girls explores themes of adolescent girlhood from the various perspectives of those who live it. Carmel has always been on the outside looking in, envious of the prettier, thinner, blonde girls who seem to own everything and everyone. Christina protects her, attempting to straddle the line between sexual awakening and childhood innocence. Lauren grapples with her lesbian sexuality in a time and place where such an identity is forbidden. And Taylor suffers the consequences of her grown-too-fast flashy ways. All four girls overlap and change, though through their interiority the reader comes to realize no girl is spared the struggle of the patriarchy.