In a world that devours one technological advance after another, the simple human questions persist. They endure despite the increased speed of the personal computer or the decreased size of the cellular phone. In a time ruled by measurements they remain elusive and undefined. The longing for love, the crisis of past versus present, the nagging hunger for meaning in the face of constant change--these questions manage to be both small and huge, both slow and fast, all at once. They are the inheritance of every generation; they are written on the very lining of our hearts. These stories are, then, simply a short list of questions. Whether it be a story like "Bones, 11 where love and time intersect, or one like "There is A., 11 where moral strength is at issue, each asks a question. Each attempts by a different angle to flush some answers from the brush. What does it mean to love? When does hope become foolishness? When lost, is it always better to stay put? These are some of the concerns taken up in this collection. In the end, the answers remain just out of reach, having only just rounded the corner at our arrival. The reader is left to either the tremulous bravado of the boy in the second story, who asks, "What do I care about wolves in the night anyway?" or the paltry rebellion of the man in "Making for the Phoenix" who is reduced finally to throwing rocks at the windows in his office building.

Short stories examining interpersonal relationships, familial relationships and legacies, self-examination. These stories were written in an attempt to understand what it is to come of age in a damaged family, to explore the feelings and events associated with finding oneself.

Cauterizing Tide is a collection of short fiction. The stories feature characters struggling with managing or creating healthy relationships. Characters wrestle with their feelings about family, love, anger, longing, and addiction. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

All My Sins is a collection of short fiction. The stories feature characters from Florida struggling with family, sexuality, masculinity, ethics, and themselves. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Yesterday Will Come is a hybrid collection of linked short stories that focuses on the way a particular family passes down the family history through physical and emotional memories. The collection largely focuses on the process of making and preserving memories and how the lack of control over one’s memory can lead to paranoia and displacement in their life. Particular value is attached to certain memories and the value and emotion attached can at times overwrite the actual content of the memory. The stories center around the Riviera family and particularly Ana Riviera’s life as she considers the many aspects of her family history she continues to inherit and the comfort and paranoia she associates with such inheritance. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This is a collection of fiction that draws on the author’s own experiences as a western foreigner in America, while also taking inspiration from many different art forms and their depictions of American life, as experienced by outsiders. The themes of this collection center around the discord and disparity prevalent between British and American life. The other key theme in this collection is how violence seems to be simmering, always near at hand, in a country like America. In this way, many of the stories allude to a kind of violence taken to be something unique to American society, which often goes unrealized or unacted upon, or sometimes unravels accordingly. The thesis project itself considers how these stories could only take place in America today, and how the aforementioned cultural discord, or disharmony, connects the narratives with a shared feeling of cultural commentary about the country as a whole. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

THE REAL THING is a collection of short stories released from the confinement of the everyday. The stories allow characters to pop off the page from every angle. With an eye for anthropomorphism and ear for lyric, the collection is comprised of twenty-nine short stories, nineteen of which work in a flash fiction form. Magical in its motions, and charming in its spirit, The Real Thing explores life’s losses and gains through the lens of the strange and at times the absurd. It invites its readers to cast away expectation, sit back, and watch the show.

"Write about what you know" is a familiar mantra in fiction workshops, but writing facts or details about what is known doesn't necessarily create character or reveal conflict. The story must develop from the alchemy of these elements and stand as a whole, and the story must pull the reader into its own particular world. "The Nature of Grief" and other stories center around one character named Loren Shay and her experiences as a first-time teacher in the small rural town of Folkston, Georgia. With the exception of "Free," these stories represent her conflicts with students and faculty and her struggle to know herself through her experiences. She does not always succeed, but the mystery of her life changes and grows with her identity. I tried to experiment with style and structure in these stories. "The Nature of Grief," "Adultrysts," and "In The Blackout" are written in episodic scenes pieced together to form a whole. For inspiration and guidance, I studied Lorrie Moore's stories from __Self-Help__and Susan Minot's __Lust__. "10-30," "Quonda B.," amd "Free" are more conventional, following traditional lines of conflict and resolution. My main goal in writing this thesis was to inhabit the fictional voice and create a rich, dimensional world of how one woman dealt with her triumphs and losses during her first year as a teacher. / Thesis / Master

The purpose of this paper is to determine the degree of uniformity in the narrative roles that male and female characters carry out in the relationships in El adulterio como vocacion y otros cuentos (2012), a collection of six short stories written by the Spanish author and journalist Juan José Millás. The analysis is based on the theory of narrative roles, developed by the French literary scholar Claude Bremond in Logique du récit (1973). The analysis concludes that even though some recurrences can be discerned, the two sexes do not have fixed roles throughout the stories. In the first three stories the women tend to be degraders and beneficiaries, while the men shoulder the role of a victim. In the last two stories of the book this situation is reversed. The fourth story differs somewhat from the rest, since both man and woman are mainly beneficiaries.

It wasn't his father's beaming face that greeted Yusuf. It was his mother's, frigid and encased in a white orna, the frayed edges of which she had trapped between her teeth. "It's getting late," she whispered to him. Shafts of bright early sunlight leaked through the curtains, attracting mosquitoes to the windowpane. Beyond it, the neighborhood was slowly waking up on the happiest day of the year. "Get up, Yusuf, please. You have to go to the mosque."