This is a triptych of three novellas. Ideally it is a summoning ritual for revolutionary consciousness, a banishing ritual for depersonalization, nightmares, cops, realtors, the onrush of global fascism, the great, clawing dread of thinking rationally about things yet to come. It is a mythopoesis. Its subject is the transmigration of souls. Loverboy Under The Knife was inspired by “Not I” by Samuel Beckett, The Politics of Experience by R. D. Laing, and a nervous breakdown I survived in the fall of 2014. Paterson Farm was inspired by Paterson by William Carlos Williams, Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and Stardew Valley, a popular video game by Eric Barone. I Saw The Deep was inspired by the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Revelation to John, and the YouTube videos of John Plant. Parts of this manuscript were written at Stephen Jones’s house in Shutesbury, Massachusetts. I was talking with him about the Chyernyshevsky novel, What Is To Be Done?, and Stephen said the damndest thing. He said Chyernyshevsky really believed in the future, which is something almost nobody does anymore. If somebody believed in the future, what kind of novel would they write today? That is the conversation I want to have with you all. I believe it’s the conversation I’m going to be having with my craft moving forward.

I propose a new account of truth in fiction that better handles truth in impossible fictions than the standard Lewisean account. Lewis' solution makes use of possible worlds to capture truths unstated but implied by the fiction. In order to improve upon this account I categorize a number of impossible fictions by the difficulties they raise for any account of fictional truth and show that Lewis' account fails to handle several of them. By careful division of the fiction, one may construct a better account of truth in fiction which captures both the truths of possible fictions as well as the truths of impossible fictions. / Master of Arts / I propose a new account of truth in fiction that better handles truth in impossible fictions than the standard Lewisean account. Lewis' solution makes use of possible worlds to capture truths unstated but implied by the fiction. In order to improve upon this account I categorize a number of impossible fictions by the difficulties they raise for any account of fictional truth and show that Lewis' account fails to handle several of them. By careful division of the fiction, one may construct a better account of truth in fiction which captures both the truths of possible fictions as well as the truths of impossible fictions.

This manuscript is written from the perspective of thirteen-year-old Adrian Matthiessen, who arrives in mid-2008 in Bethlehem, South Africa at a clinic in the township of Bohlokong where his mother is volunteering. Adrian is witness to an act of magic surrounding an orphan girl who arrives at the clinic; an event that many use to label her as a pariah. Deeply troubled by this, Adrian begins to investigate who this strange girl is by seeking out the stories of the Basotho, and by befriending a volunteer medical student from France, the grandson of the clinic's founder, and a South African girl he grows attracted to. This investigation reveals the troubled history of the founder who fought in Angola, a history that has now brought danger upon the clinic and its residents. Adrian also discovers that this investigation becomes a part of his own process of grieving over a recent family tragedy. The Theory of Light draws much of its material from the rich history of the region, as well as from the traditional myths and practices of the Basotho people. In many ways the manuscript bridges two worlds: one that is struggling to cope with globalization, and one that strives to retain cultural and historical traditions. This bridge places Adrian in a limbo of trying to understand magic, historical conflict, personal loss, first-love, and what it is like to be an outsider in South Africa. / Master of Fine Arts

When You Find Us We Will Be Gone is a collection of short stories exploring several themes: place and identity in the American landscape; public and private conflicts in Tibet; the role of art in the Holocaust. The stories are set in America, Croatia, Japan, Germany, and Tibet, where the characters imbibe strangeness from their surroundings and in doing so chart loneliness and dissatisfaction with life. / Master of Fine Arts

The New American Book of James, told through the comic first-person perspective of Dickie James, explores a world where the mythic elements of Christianity become hyperbolically realized as an extension of Dickie’s tormented psyche. As he grows larger, hungrier, and more desperate, his sins never fail to evoke Old Testament retribution while he both seeks and dreads New Covenant redemption. His downward spiral coincides with his father’s, Pastor Daniel James, who’s certain he knows how all stories end. Set in the swampy Tidewater region of Virginia, the book opens when Dickie, at the age of eight, experiences a vivid night terror and claims it was a demon. His father clumsily attempts an exorcism, traumatizing his son and robbing him of sleep. Daniel, believing he’s cast out a demon, grows increasingly fanatical, and as Dickie ages his doubts not just about Christianity but also his father deepen, even as he convinces himself that he is the cause of the plague-like disasters wreaking havoc on his town. The New American Book of James encompasses seven years and features characters haunted by demons: Dickie’s ferocious best friend, Rodney; Dickie’s mother, Maggie, whose religious attachment to her kitchen counterbalances the faith of her husband; and middle-aged seductress Ms. Miller, drawn to Dickie’s mannish size and guileless nature. Dickie wrestles with the analogous influences of faith and despair, spirit and flesh, and explores how, in a world where sin and righteousness are many shades of gray, reality itself is (re)constructed through orthodoxy, belief, and fear. / Master of Fine Arts

A story about two young women from very different backgrounds who are united by friendship and the trauma of sexual assault. / Master of Fine Arts

On March 30th 2006, at the age of forty, my brother, who I grew up with and looked up to as a child, who'd started to lose his mind in his early 20s, killed his wife and her mother. He left his three boys orphaned and traumatized. My father, Orestes Fuentes, was born in 1928, in a farm deep in the Cuban countryside where there were spirits and saints and demons and Santeria rituals, and curses were real. This book will explore our father's prejudices and superstitions and his refusal to acknowledge his son's demons, in an effort to find the reasons why his son, my brother, Jose, eventually killed the mother and grandmother of his children, the why he thought they were agents of Satan. My book explores a curse that Orestes (and therefore all of us) incurred, and the sins that caused it. The book looks at the apogee of that curse: my brother's murders and, ultimately, the reversal of that curse, which, in writing it, I realized, is what this book is. / Master of Fine Arts

The [tombstone] symbol is a typographical initialism used in mathematics to signify the end of a proof. It is known colloquially as the "tombstone." The stories in this collection carry both senses of the symbol. Characters not only reach the end of once-familiar systems--marriage, freedom, life, faith--but they also live in a universe where proof and certainty can no longer be taken for granted. A child who desperately wants to believe in his inherent goodness must face the possibility that he is in fact as flawed as those he scorns. A man watches his family shrink away from him after he commits a series of selfish acts. An addict's childhood, fraught with isolation, haunts her ability to heal in adulthood. As for tombstones, these stories are obsessed with death, finality, and endings, which reveal more about a person's true self than where they began. When asked "what is a story?", Diane Williams replied, "Can a story be a dream come true?" The stories collected here are dream-like as well, simplistic and estranged from common logics, formed from an unconscious urge to believe that there is indeed a more perfect world waiting for us in the near distance. In this collection, the hunger for wholeness persists; the possibility for a happy ending, however, remains as unlikely as rewriting one's past. / Master of Fine Arts

Good and Gone is a novel that explores the immediate aftermath of a broken marriage from the perspectives of the newly fractured couple and their teenage son. The characters contend with the reality of the separation -- and the ways their lives remain irrevocably tangled -- against the backdrop of the cutthroat worlds of high finance and youth baseball.

Anna-Maria is a cellist at the Ospedale della Pietà, a centuries-old Venetian institution that houses a hospital, a convent, an orphanage, and a music school for girls. As Anna-Maria begins venturing outside the walls of the Pietà, the lives of various characters begin to collide--Anna and her chorus mate Maddalena become entranced with an opera that comes through town, a widowed Fishmonger becomes obsessed with Anna because she reminds him of her dead son, an ailing doge mourns the loss of his city, a strange woman who lives in the sea begins meddling with the lives of those she encounters. The story unfolds in a series of interlocking vignettes, curated by an overarching narrator who has some agency over the characters and which sides of their stories she wants to reveal. The larger narrative structure imitates that of a music score, or a libretto, each vignette carrying a particular thematic sound that functions as a part of the whole. The constraint of the vignette mimics the constraints the narrator has placed on the characters by casting them in their own limiting roles--the young stupid girl, the lusty old maestro, the nun, the widower, the tragic ingénue. As the novel progresses, the characters begin to push against these constraints, and the story begins to slip out from the narrator's grip. All Saints is about performance and expectation, obsession and objectification, empathy and connection, the real and the surreal, and the limitless ways that different lives can come together and unfold.