This collection of short stories attempts to examine the role of a changing and often indifferent world has in the way various characters achieve maturity. Though the past is not always obvious in each story, each protagonist is characterized as holding onto some aspect of his or her past life in a way that is detrimental to their growing as human beings. the stories attempt to portray the indifference of the world as it moves forward to the plight of these characters, and to portray the manner in which they each come to terms with such a world and with their own lives.

"Of the endeavors made each year to select and reprint in an anthology the best magazine stories of the preceding twelve months, Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien's Best Short Stories, the first to be initiated, is one of the best known and most widely recognized. Many college, public, and secondary school librarians have accepted the collections as representative of the best current short story writing, and have made them a permanent part of their annual acquisitions. In this study, an attempt shall be made to determine O'Brien's purpose in establishing the anthology, the criteria followed, the procedures used in making the selections, and the critics' reactions to these criteria, procedures, and selections from 1915 to 1949. And finally, in order to determine more clearly what the reader may expect to find in a volume of Best Short Stories in terms of authors, kinds of stories, and magazines represented, an examination shall be made of these three factors in the selections of the eleven-year period, 1939-1949"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "August, 1951." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Robert G. Clapp, Professor Directing Study. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-71).

Land of Flowers is a collection of short fiction presenting a Florida that stands in counterpoint to the image the state holds in the national consciousness-an image of a backward region rife with rednecks, retirees, racists, and religious kooks. In contrast, these stories feature the natives, the tourists, the immigrants, and also the transplants who are drawn to this "paradise" with hopes of finding warmth, escape, and a new life that so often fails to materialize. Many of the inhabitants of these stories are mired in a state of introspection. In the title piece, an early Spanish explorer contemplates his existence as well as that of God's. In another story, an actor/bartender considers how eking out a living at a luxurious resort has sapped his passion for the theater. In trying to save a family of doves, a father finds a metaphor for his role as protector and provider for his own family. Another story is about an old man dying in the palmetto brush who discovers comfort in a place far from a society that no longer suits him. Space and place are the threads that holds these stories together: place in regard to the topographical Florida, and space in regard to where the main characters are mentally. The true physical landscape of the territory that once extended as far west as New Orleans is depicted in many of the stories-a landscape shorn of condos, strip malls, and theme parks, a landscape that defines Florida as wild, open, raw, and primal in the best sense of the word. These stories of people, place, and space work against the stereotypes and toward a deeper understanding of Florida.

Friday is a Planet: Stories is a collection of short fiction that explores the ways loss can alter family bonds. Characters in these stories have lost daughters, sisters, mothers, and friends. Some characters go to extreme lengths to return to their loved ones—one woman hallucinates, another time travels. Others deal with the loss in more conventional ways, through support groups and the emotional outlet of community theatre. What ties these stories together is a sense of post-loss confusion and mystery. The characters are unsure how to move forward, or if they should try. The men and women in these stories struggle with faith as they navigate life after loss. They question who to have faith in. They wonder whether it is ever okay to let faith lapse. While attempting to answer these questions, the characters discover different questions. What are the connections between faith and loss? Faith and hope? Faith and forgiveness?

This collection of short fiction probes the lives of characters trying to make their home in the flat, unchanging landscape of the small towns that make up central Florida. The largely static environment reflects the rigid patterns of behavior and domesticity the characters find themselves so easily falling into. Seemingly ordinary items-a shotgun, a t-shirt, a paper bag-and the small moments that make up everyday life are imbued with significance as men and women painfully aware of their own ordinariness struggle to hold onto those fragile instances of connection, happiness, or even their own self-constructed sense of identity. The struggle becomes one of opposing forces: as characters yearn to connect to the people, places, and objects around them, they find themselves more and more attracted to the idea of escaping their own lives, even if for just a moment. Stories range from two pages to over twenty and introduce the reader to a diverse population of characters, from an out of work construction worker cum wannabe philosopher to an amateur historian writing a history nobody cares about to the one man who actually did escape-a cockfight organizer who made it big in Georgia before blowing himself up at a gas station. Characters fight over toothbrushes, puzzle out whether a father is just drunk or beautiful, and look for space stations they may or may not be able to see at all. As in life, in these stories, it's the small, quiet moments that come to define who these people are and demonstrate their pursuit of something bigger and more important, even if they don't have any idea what that may be.

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This collection of short fiction explores femininity – a difficult term, in and of itself, because it implies that to be a woman is to be feminine in the traditional sense, or feminist in the revolutionary sense – rarely do the connotations allow for much in between. But I choose this term over “womanhood," for example, because it is more difficult, and culturally loaded, and conflicted, and even offensive. In truth, these stories attempt to portray the multi-faceted nature of how we see the feminine. They hope to convey the most fragile and complicated net of relationships, with men and with women, with mothers and fathers and children and lovers and enemies, each of whom make their own demands about what sort of femininity they require. Considering all this, I tend to think that there is no such thing as the much-talked-about “strong woman" in real life, not completely. She is constantly being pushed into corners where she is weak, or careless, or cruel–secretly unsure of who she is expected and ought to be. The result is a female psyche that is always shifting and disintegrating and dissolving, becoming someone or something else, like the characters in these eight stories. The modern woman is no sure thing. She is in flux and changing shape. And really, it is for those of us who watch to decide if it is for better, or for worse. / Master of Fine Arts

What is a library? It is easy to envision the ordinary and ubiquitous library that we are all familiar with, but is there more to libraries that is yet to be explored? What is a concept of a library? What do we as architects envision as the design for a library? The Thesis is built upon the idea that Libraries should be designed out of stories, because stories are written in books and books are found in libraries. According to the writer Borges, the concept of a library, is that it is composed of an indefinite and infinite number of galleries, which are connected by vestibules. Anyone in this library can see upper and lower from any galleries and "all are repeated in the same disorder which constitutes an order!" ... The Thesis explores this concept of finding the order through repeated disorders, in another words, a labyrinth. The writer Umberto Eco has said in one of his novels: "How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths." In search of this "beauty" in the world, through this thesis I have explored and found the procedure for designing a library. / Master of Architecture