In "Why I Can Never Leave the South," protagonist Zora-Neale Hurston Reed is called back to the South to give the eulogy at the funeral of her childhood friend, Roselia. Roselia had been murdered, supposedly by her boyfriend, Alex. Zora reminisces about growing up with the two of them, speculating as to why Alex would have been driven to kill Roselia. She remembers how sad Roselia was when they parted ways as Zora went off to college in Oregon, and how they became more distant as the years passed. At the funeral, Zora begins to give her eulogy, and we finally learn what happened to Rosalie. "Fifteen Selections from White Hills High," chronicles the daily, intertwining lives of various students at White Hills High. Teddy loves his irresponsible mother, Virginia, and picks up the slack for her when he can. Sean The Dream of Ralph and Cody

In this collection of stories, people find themselves face to face with great trouble: a house lost to flood, a brother lost to the river, a girl on the edge of an adulthood she can't possibly survive. Set in Northern California along the banks of the Sacramento and American Rivers, the stories feature characters who live below the radar of the middle-class. Central to the narratives are notions of loss, lust, pleasure, and struggle.

Set in the former Yugoslavia, contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Midwest America, the collection of short stories follows the complicated trajectory of war-survivor to refugee and, then, immigrant. These stories---about religious prisoners who are not at all religious, about young, philosophizing boys tempting the bullets of snipers, about men retracing their fathers' steps over bridges that no longer exist---grapple with memory, imagination, and the nature of art, and explore the notion of writer as witness.

This thesis contains stories about loss and the trauma that's felt in its wake. Within all of these stories, characters struggle with the notion of "healing" and "moving on." Whether it be a young boy who deals with his grief by cannibalizing his mother in "A Simple Request", or a teenage girl who wishes her chronically suicidal mother would finally kill herself in "Little Accidents," all stories within this collection explore the very unique, and human ways, in which people deal with grief.

A collection of six stories. Each story features a different cast of characters, ranging from high-school-aged girls to 70-year-old women in retirement communities. Most stories are told in the third-person limited point of view, and adhere to a traditional narrative structure, occasionally utilizing "found" text, such as letters and an entry in the DSM to advance plot and set the tone. This collection explores the lives of characters afraid to articulate their desires and unable to communicate as they grapple with loss, suicide, trauma, illness, and the dissolution of family.