Scores: A Story Collection

This is a short story collection dealing with the themes of identity, immigration, death, and ethnicity, all juxtaposed with the game of baseball. The critical introduction of this thesis begins with a detailed survey of the baseball fiction genre, with a focus on seminal works and their respective authors, and their place in American literature. I examine major authors outside the genre who have employed baseball (metaphorically, symbolically, synecdochically) in their own works, as well as analyze the effect and evolution of realism in baseball fiction, and the themes of ethnicity and identity. I explore my own works in the hope of determining whether or not they qualify as baseball fiction or rest outside the genre. Finally, I speculate as to the future of baseball fiction, and the possibility for a new subgenre of Latino/Latina-authored baseball fiction