Alligator - by David Ryan (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In Alligator, David Ryan's experiments in language and form produce 23 stark, lyrical stories that explore the human condition. Kaleidoscopic, surprising, and occasionally shocking, Ryan's liminal realism shifts between incantatory parables and a hard-scrabble, fractured reality, rooted in the deep, visceral logic of memory, wild impulse, and dream. Alligator's stories collect desire, dislocation of family, love, and estrangement into a brutalist architecture-where occasional sharp eruptions of chaos co-exist with hope and grace.

Review Quotes

A collection of stories that reflect the precision and balance of a high-wire aerialist. As with the high wire, these stories require close attention; they should be read slowly and carefully. They seem to have been written that way, every step deft and deliberate.

-Kirkus (starred review)

Ryan (Animals in Motion) explores the boundary between dreams and reality in this approachable and surprisingly moving collection... Throughout, Ryan's offhand style gives way to startling epiphanies. This one leaves a mark.

-Publishers Weekly

David Ryan is one of the very best short story writers on earth. This is what genuine mastery of a form looks like. There aren't even that many people who are close.

-Rick Moody

David Ryan knows that people love and suffer and do crazy things, thus chronicled in this haunting and intrepid collection. I was left with the uncanny feeling that no matter how a life might veer off course, it will have been foretold in these pages.

-Elizabeth McKenzie

David Ryan's stories are fierce and complex, full of achingly convincing characters whose lives we see all around us, symbolic and imperiled with a bold and complex vision of what it means to be alive. People get ready. David Ryan is a writer I greatly admire, and I loved this collection.

-Brandon Hobson, author of The Devil is a Southpaw

A menagerie of a book beset by beautiful horrors and mind-bending prose. David Ryan's unforgettable characters are haunted, hopeful, lucky, cursed, grieving, thoughtful, trapped, and free. Ryan stands tall among the most lyrical, gifted storytellers of our age. Open your heart to Alligator, and let this beast of a book take a bite.

-David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals and Lake Life