Schwartz, Jason

Aggregate is a collection of short stories that chronicle the coming of age of its first-person narrator. He is a half Indian, half American boy who lived in 1990s New York City. The stories begin in childhood and run into his early twenties. They illustrate his experiences growing up and being othered in different ways. Themes of neglect, addiction, sexual assault, and violence create a cycle of abuse that repeats throughout his life.
Each story can be read as a standalone piece, but when taken together they become a tapestry of trauma and a life of addiction. These stories aim to highlight the connection between trauma and addiction.

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.

Included is a collection of speculative fiction by author Nicholas Becher
that incorporates research from Cherokee folklore as well as experimental
perspectives of place and tone.

Bullet is a collection of short stories that fictionalizes the last days of
twentieth century world authors. Inspired heavily by the biographies of each writer,
the stories depict the spiraling psyches of each suicide. Each narrator is carefully
crafted out of the real life of each author though, first and foremost, each story is
fiction. By the end, Bullet is a contemplation of both life and death from the
perspective of the greatest minds of the last one hundred years. Only now, in the new
millennium, can the twentieth century be definitively sketched. Bullet is one of the
first pieces of writing to do so.

Please, Not at the Dinner Table is a series of eleven short stories that treat
embarrassing or taboo subjects in an analytical manner that is often light-hearted and
humorous. The stories, though fictional, are written in a realist style, and are set in
contemporary times.
As a whole, the stories deal directly and graphically with certain realities oflife
that are often shied away from in literature. In dealing with these intimate, embarrassing,
or unfortunate necessities of the human animal, the characters often are forced to reveal
their true natures, if only to the reader. Though parts of this collection are graphic,
outright vulgarity is most often restricted to the voice of a character or narrator.

South Florida is a collective of eclectic personalities who often transplant
themselves from all across the country. They are often seeking a new
opportunity, or running away from the baggage of their past. This collection of
fiction stories seeks to explore the lives of the people who populate the area
and serve the rest of the world who descend on the area annually seeking their
own personal one to two week paradise. The collection sees those often living
lives of quite desperation, while at the same time returning to their jobs in the
service industry night after night smiling. Juxtaposing the faith-based life
against the backdrop of the night life, the characters are all on a journey to
discover their own paradise the area offers. Sometimes they find it in small
moments they experience. Sometimes they find it on the open road leaving.

The thesis proposed for my M.F.A in creative writing is a collection of
vignette-length short stories with each story intended to be a self-standing narrative.
Each short story in this collection will be dissimilar in narrative structure and contain
characters of various age, gender, ethnicity, and geographies which do not intermix
with the other stories. However, language style, mood, and tone will subtly overlap to
provide glue, suggesting a kaleidoscopic whole. Thematically, the stories deal with a
pattern of threshold moments: coming to terms with disillusionment, substance
addiction, death, moral ambiguity, and futility.

This manuscript is a collection of short fiction pieces workshopped in creative
writing classes throughout my undergraduate and graduate career at Florida Atlantic
University, influenced by the experimental and form-driven nature of some of the writing
workshops as well as other courses I took during my years at the university. This work is
especially preoccupied with the opposed and intertwined natures of genre fiction and
literary fiction. Other themes include human nature, humor, food and cooking, tabletop
games, and exploration of form in short fiction.

The Traveling Burito King is a novel split into two narratives that work to
compare the virtual to the real world and push against the politic climate created by
anonymity It is a novel centered around the development of Denver and his avatar
Dovim The novel demonstrates a confrontation with the fantasy of change and how that
culminates in little more than a shift and an impossibility to turn back time

The Muckabout: Stories is a collection of short stories that displays my growing
emphasis on style and diction to sustain the reader’s attention within my work. This is
accomplished, at times, by providing variations of tired, or expected, common uses of
language (that is: language common to short stories that one commonly encounters in
alleged “normative fiction”); and by persuading the reader to focus, most importantly, on
the language and syntactical styling’s of the narrator.