Bucak, Ayse Papatya

“Small Stories” offers a glimpse of the kinds of stories that risk going unknown: stories of historical Africa and its sustained influence on the present and future, voices of women, community, and communal resistance to expulsion from history. At a macro level, the intent of this collection is to demand diversity and inclusivity in the modern literary, social, and academic culture. Rethinking history by inaugurating a wider set of evidentiary sources from the past does not mean escaping to a complete amnesia about the current position of Africans in literary arts, but recognizing that no single form of historical evidence can be used to accurately incorporate our story into literature

This is a work of creative nonfiction that details the authors’ own experience with
homelessness, relays the stories of homeless individuals he has encountered, challenges
conventional notions of poverty and what it means to be home, and invites the reader to
imagine herself into a day in the life of a destitute individual.

Somewhere Florida is a collection of short stories which take place in or revolve
around Florida. Each story interrogates or demonstrates aspects of introversion as manifest
in story settings and situations, character (un)involvement and (in)action, and narrative
mode.

This thesis is a second draft of a novel about an orphaned girl and boy, Kate and
Penn, who befriend one another on a Midwestern college campus and discover belonging
and a sense of self, as well as a fantastical quality they both possess called Influence. The
story explores themes of family, friendship, community, fear culture, and adult identity.

"Head Lines of the Extra Ordinary: Collisions and Miracles" is a language-driven
15-story fiction collection that experiments with intertwining the traditions of oral and
written storytelling. Within these stories, ordinary people step up to the extraordinary
because of an unusual occurrence that requires a moment of change. Several of the stories
within the collection take their premise from actual news headlines. To lend cohesion to
the collection, multiple stories contain one or more reappearing characters.

This short story collection is a meditation on happenstance and circumstance as played
out in each character's life often catalyzed through the introduction of an unknown
element: whether that element be a new character, perspective, or knowledge.
Stylistically, the voice of the narration is colorful and humorous though the subject
matter may be of the melancholic or macabre variety. The point of view changes from
first to third, depending on the story and main character; however, the unifying factors
of this collection is that each character is changed because of a loss, whether metaphoric
or literal.

In this novel of first person present tense , a family of women responds to death in techniques of memento mori and carpe diem. Whether living for a cause or without one, their journeys cover three continents and five islands where geography is metaphor for the violence, wanderlust, power, love, and need to create that drives thems as they interrogate the controlled demolition of their world, answering it with a return to nomadic lifestyles. Celia is an escape artist, satirizing the world as she wanders through it, putter her own perspective stamp and slant on things, while Taylor wants to be president but leaves mainstream for the slipstream of trauma. Elaine is a cornucopia of inputs, energies, and charges fired up all at once, while Ruth paces her longevity in the flatness of the new world. At the hidden center, Noni attempts to reincarnate herself without dying.

This collection of eight short stories explores the themes of nonconformity, selfacceptance,
and transformation. Characters confront religious, racial, and moral issues,
which result in overcoming some internal or external challenge. The stories are told with
magical, satirical, and traditional story-telling elements. For example, "The Liberation of
Mammy" is about a slave who uses her secret pancake recipe to cause a distraction that
allows her to escape from bondage; "Her Own House," is inspired by the biblical burning
bush story; and "Notes on a Video Honey" is the story of a young girl who doesn't
complete! y understand or approve of her mother's decision to degrade herself by being
mere eye candy in rap videos. Worlds similar to our own and worlds that are
exaggerations of our own are intended to guide readers to ideas they may have never
before considered.

This is a collection of short stories that deal with elements of identity, the
fantastic, fragmentation, poetry, the media, politics, and myriad other themes. The stories
are connected by an interwoven thread of self-discovery and awareness. These stories
present an image and then rework it, giving greater or varied details about whatever is
being describing in the hope of achieving a more visceral story, a more true experience of
writing and reading, and a better understanding of the emotions that underlie the story.
These stories also try to capture and communicate the idea that our experience is a
common one, across time and cultures, and the idea that many, many more writers than I
could ever read in my lifetime have written about this experience.

Bud and Scooter, two teenaged cousins, are making the trip of their young lives in
the midst of the Great Depression. Their family friend in rural Florida, Jake Gilchrist,
head of a poor family with three small children, has died while visiting his sick mother on
Long Island. His wife cannot afford to have his body shipped back by train for burial, so
Bud and Scooter volunteer for a goodwill mission and grand adventure: they take Bud's
father's pickup truck, drive a thousand miles up US 1, pick up Jake's body, pack it in ice,
and transport it back to Florida. Along the way they meet people (both common and
extraordinary), they work out their differences (with words and with fists), they come
face-to-face with beauty and goodness as well as with poverty and evil.. .and they get to
see the Empire State Building.