Matching Items (4)
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- All Subjects: Literature, Modern
- Creators: Ison, Tara
Description
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.
ContributorsHusić, Vedran (Author) / Pritchard, Melissa (Thesis advisor) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In Everything I See Your Hand is a collection of short stories that takes place in the "Little Armenia" neighborhood of East Hollywood, California--an ethnic enclave made up of immigrants from the former Soviet state who came to Los Angeles following the collapse of the USSR in the early '90s. These fictions are rooted in my own personal experience and are about dispossession, domesticity, and the tangled ties between generations, focusing particularly around the tensions that arose from assimilation and disillusionment, from changing attitudes towards sex and homosexuality, violence and masculinity. Many of the stories grapple with the idea of self-exile, or ruminate on the difference between leaving the motherland, and leaving the mother, or other familial bodies, in order to pursue grander desires: a better life in America, superior education in distant universities, love in marriages with foreigners, etc. The body, therefore, becomes a central motif in the collection, principally the hands and forehead, which are traditionally areas in which the destinies are written for the Armenian people. The Armenian-American protagonists of In Everything I See Your Hand struggle with the belief that their lives are already written, their futures already decided, futures that they can only escape through death or departure--if they can escape them at all.
ContributorsKuzmich, Naira (Author) / McNally, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Pritchard, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
A collection of eight stories set in American landscapes that are distorted, anachronistic or magical. The characters in these stories are hunting monsters, touring strange museums, dating shapeshifters and performing death-defying illusions, but the greatest mysteries they encounter are the most human: obsession, loneliness, loss. As they struggle to distinguish fantasy and reality, they also strive to transform and transcend the things that haunt them.
ContributorsMartone, Anthony (Author) / Pritchard, Melissa (Thesis advisor) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
DescriptionThat Would Only Be the Beginning of Eternity is a short novel spanning four days in the life of Dominic Adler: a sarcastic, cocaine-addled young man who lives in New York and sells advertising space. It explores the tension between past and present and the inevitability of miscommunication.
ContributorsSouthey, Kathleen (Author) / Mcnally, Thomas M. (Thesis advisor) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014