ALLIGATOR AND OTHER STORIES

A luminous collection of stories about feeling displaced - as a Syrian, as an Arab, as a woman, as an ‘other'

Dima Alzayat's haunting, rich and tender ALLIGATOR AND OTHER STORIES marks the arrival of a tremendously gifted new talent, chronicling a sense of displacement through everyday scenarios. There is the intern in pre-#MeToo Hollywood of ‘Only Those Who Struggle Succeed', the New York City children on the lookout for a place to play on the heels of Etan Patz's kidnapping in ‘Disappearance', and the “dangerous” women of ‘The Daughters of Manat' who struggle to assert their independence. Meanwhile a woman performs burial rites for her brother in ‘Ghusl' and a great-aunt struggles to explain cultural identity to her niece in ‘Once We Were Syrians'.

The title story ‘Alligator' is a masterpiece of historical reconstruction and intergenerational trauma, told through social media posts, newspaper clippings, and testimonials, that starts with the true story of the lynching of a Syrian immigrant couple by law officers in small-town Florida. Placed in a wider context of US racial violence, the extrajudicial deaths, and what happens to the couple's children and their children's children in the years after, ‘Alligator' challenges the demands of American assimilation and its limits.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dima Alzayat was born in Damascus, Syria, grew up in San Jose, California, and now lives in Manchester. She was the winner of a 2018 Northern Writers' Award, the 2017 Bristol Short Story Prize and 2015 Bernice Slote Award, runner-up in the 2018 Deborah Rogers Award and the 2018 Zoetrope: All-Story Competition, and was Highly Commended in the 2013 Bridport Prize. She is a PhD student and associate lecturer at Lancaster University.