This linked short story collection follows the evolution of Bar Eugenia—a legacy restaurant once a staple in New York City's Southside—from the early 1920's to the present day. Each story explores the intersection of NYC's working-class roots and increasingly prevalent showbiz culture, presenting a cast of characters who find themselves out of place, with a better life visible just beyond reach. In the premier story, "Bar Eugenia," a man with a dream of entertaining entertainers receives the Bar Eugenia in a back-alley deal with the mysterious mobster Mr. C but soon finds himself caught in a feud between the Mafioso and silent-film star Buster Keaton. In "A Demon in the Dark," a desperate detective searches for a Southside serial killer among the cast of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. In "Lights, Camera, Action," an old war hero with a secret finds himself competing, appropriately, on a military-themed episode of the game show I've Got a Secret. Throughout each of the stories in the collection, characters are asked to reevaluate where they are, where they want to go, and how far they'll travel to get there.

In Charcoal Boys & Dreams of Igniting, themes of race, queerness, isolation, othering, fetishization, love and relationships are all explored. They are paired up against one another and questioned through the lens of creative writing. Experimental and traditional poetry, prose poetry and memoir are all incorporated to make this possible. Examining how pain can lead to beauty and working to strike up a discourse on societal preconceptions. This work is an attempt to jut open the silent discourse and provoke discussion of these subjects, to make the reader uncomfortable. For it is in our discomfort that we learn the most about ourselves.

Be Your Own Charlatan! is a collection of personal essays about the nature of violence, the intricacy of aspiration, and the labels we use to distinguish our identities and accomplishments. The essays explore how such labels can be limiting and frustrating while simultaneously useful for navigating what is expected of us. Essays such as "Hip Throw," "Fighting," and "Rolling: A Ladies' Guide to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu" use the lens of martial arts to examine femininity, the difference between perceived and actual violence, and the line between violence and sport. "White Homework" and "Couch Sitter" reflect upon ways of navigating the expectations of other people as well as self-invented parameters and limitations. "The Teacher Doesn't Jump in Front of the Bullet" and "Teacher Eavesdrops Thursday At the Diner" dissect the myth that teachers are selfless and patient nurturers. "I'm Not an Actor, But I Play One in This Essay," "Colorblind Casting," and "Anything and Everything" reflect upon life as a student, and how the enthusiasm expressed by various teachers can reshape long-held expectations and ideas about identity. Be Your Own Charlatan! tackles these ideas through humor that leads to introspection and introspection that unlocks the absurdity of the expectations we place on ourselves, those we meet, and the world around us.

Skin Baby is about the inevitability of decline and decay—what happens when we turn away from it, and what happens when we're forced to confront it head on. The essays in this collection focus on navigating a parent's devastating diagnosis of Parkinson's disease and the struggle to control its accompanying chaos. The collection interrogates identity, addiction, generational mental illness, and parent-child relationships. In "Home for the Holidays," illness is an invisible foe that shatters expectations. "Prologue to Revelations" and "This Too Shall Pass" consider rampant escapism and anesthetization. "The Druggist's Daughter" explores preconceived notions of family dynamic. Other essays focus on discoveries about inherited traits both physical and mental ("Things Unattended"), desperation for metaphysical and spiritual understanding ("Bruja," "Peripheries") and accepting the inescapable ("Skin Baby," "What is Owed," "Next Year in Jerusalem"). Parkinson's disease slowly robs people of their faculties as it progresses. Death ultimately occurs, but not before a long period of watching and waiting. Skin Baby explores what that watching and waiting looks like for one family.

This Might Get Heavy is a collection of essays which explores intersecting themes of body image, mental illness, and sexual identity. Through these personal essays, Mayer explores and interrogates the societal norms and tendencies that have formed the shape into which she has forced herself both mentally and physically. In essays such as "The Point System" and "Refraction," Mayer uses memoir to depict the origins of her struggles with body image and disordered eating. "Tara's Body Quiz and Answer Guide" and "How to Determine Your Sexuality: A Guide to Finding Your Letter in the Acronym" inhabit "hermit crab" forms to break through emotional barriers and question the need for conformity. Other essays, like "Green Tea and Giant Donuts" and "(Potentially Unwanted) Letters from Your Former Self," act as thematic bridges that explore the ways body image and sexuality can influence one another, ultimately helping Mayer to unearth previously undiscovered pieces of her identity. This Might Get Heavy uses several voices and forms to address and break away from the perceived expectations that have ruled the narrator's life. It is both a reflection on the ways in which a body is built and a rebellion against the binding that holds these parts together.

Boitawl ("Boi"- lack, devoid of, "Tawl"- bottom/ ground/ foundation), the word in one of the Bengali dialects refers to one without a ground beneath her feet. The thesis, a hybrid collection of prose and verse including narratives and graphic vignettes, flash, fabulist and short stories, prose poems and free verse imagines the inside worlds of such un-settled existences. In the process, the pieces connect migration, memory, childhood and lost towns with fractured humans caught in between - to reveal what lies under pillars of desires, the shapes of unsaid longings and recurrent images in their dreams.

Counter Clockwise Culture Shock is a memoir focused the narrator's return to his hometown, a place he barely escaped: drug addiction, incarceration, bad relationships, alienation, an Oedipal mother, and suicidal threats. It is reflection on both culture and self, after I gained an outside perspective from Japan. The narrator is forced to relive nihilism and monotony, and face the troubles of his younger years. It describes the difficult journey of today's youth, in an evermore technologically dynamic world - with few role models able to plot a course through. This is a meditation on past actions that ended in survival. Unlike most books dealing with cultural alienation, it focuses on a reinterpretation of my own culture. The main theme of the memoir is identity. The remnants of adventure, ingrained in the narrator's mind, contrast with a return to the deja vu of a distorted hometown. Many of the stories cut across time and space to mimic the disorientation of the narrator. The clarity of these cultural distortions emerges when viewed through an outside lens. Not only does Counter Clockwise Culture Shock distill these distortions, it uses an Eastern perspective - and language - to better understand the flaws and strengths of indoctrinated cultures. An outside perspective of a different culture expands the narrator's former view of the world. Suicide and depression are destroying Western society, and this is an attempt to catalog stresses of Western culture and help people in similar circumstances.

Assisted Living is a collection of stories that explores themes of parenthood, brotherhood, old and new love, adultery, financial strife, and the many faces of loss. The collection offers different points of view, which allow the reader to experience these themes within varying lives and situations. For example, the eponymous "Assisted Living" is from the perspective of a pet-sitter at the brink of losing both her job and husband, while "Holy Mother" explores the point of view of a wife coming to terms with her affair and the physical injury that has changed her husband. "The World of Reptiles" follows a father walking his son through a zoo before they receive his son's cancer test results, while "Host" follows two sons who discover their recently deceased mother believed in reincarnation before she died. Other stories explore characters stuck in relationships - both familial and romantic - that started bright, but curled toward the dark, leaving the characters feeling trapped by the ones they love. The collection as a whole seeks to explore people stuck between selves, people striving to be new and better, while failing and succeeding in ways big and small.

How can we find happiness when everything falls apart? When the world is ending, can we grab onto anything? In this collection, a sister recounts her mother's telekinetic control over her younger brother; a big box store assistant manager, with no-where-to-go-but-down, attempts to reclaim his estranged family while working in a mostly-abandoned, mostly-radioactive beach town; their first date at an ocean-side sports bar is anything but a fairy tale, regardless of the mermaids; a battery-operated child latches onto what little of her life she remembers; a Florida girl scout troop come-of-age discussing hook-handed-killers, and other bogeymen, around the campfire; a week after sentient life is discovered in the cosmos, a married couple combat depression, and anxiety, while navigating a twenty-year high-school reunion; a dragon falls in love with a cat. These stories seek humor out of horror, hope out of despair. They are restless, under-siege, and deeply connected through their mutual traumas. The characters find love in all the wrong places, hate in all the right ones, death around every corner, and life in the tiniest of cracks.

Waiving Miranda is a nonfiction collection that explores my career in law enforcement with a special emphasis on how the day-to-day association with others can lure a person into self-observation. The essays include my experiences as a road-patrol deputy, sex-crimes detective, and homicide detective in one of the largest county law enforcement agencies in the nation. Instead of the TV version of law enforcement— anecdotes of police chases and shoot outs—this thesis examines people on both sides of the yellow crimes scene tape as they face their own mortality and the gruesome truth of people’s unabashed cruelty towards one another. These essays wrestle with such issues as the following: confronting my own perceived inadequacies while encountering the expectations of those whose ideas of police work come from shows such as SWAT, Law and Order, and NYPD Blue; balancing career and parenting in the aftermath of divorce and a loss of purpose; pursuing a career in law enforcement with the idea of serving the community; discovering that policing in real life is a direct contradiction to the celluloid heroes I grew up watching on television; staging an internal war and ultimately resolving to move past resentment and move forward with a new purpose. Unlike most true crime dramas, this collection does not promise a happily ever after. Instead, it’s a detailed account of the men and women in the law enforcement community today, and how, as much as they guard the public against criminals at large, so must they guard themselves against the emotional toll that this knowledge carries with it.