Lisa Moore
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Information about the author.
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Alligator: A Novel
Lisa Moore
Lisa Moore’s Alligator gives dramatic birth to a new kind of fiction: North Atlantic Gothic. The story moves with the swiftness of a gator in attack mode through the lives of a group of brilliantly rendered characters in contemporary St. John’s, Newfoundland—a city whose spiritual location is somewhere in the heart of Flannery O’Connor country. Its denizens jostle each other in uneasy arabesques of desire, greed, lust, and ambition, juxtaposed with a yearning for purity, depth, and redemption.
Meet Madeleine, the driven aging filmmaker whose mission is to complete a Bergmanesque magnum opus before she dies; Frank, a young man of innocence and determination whose life is a strange anthology of unpredictable dangers; Valentin, the sociopathic Russian refugee whose predatory tendencies threaten everyone he encounters; and Colleen, at seventeen a hard-edged female Holden Caulfield, drawn inexorably to the places where alligators thrive.
In these pages humanity is a bizarre combination of the reptilian and the saintly. Listen to its heartbeat, and be moved—and delighted.
Lisa Moore
The only certainty in life, according to these stories, comes from the accumulation of moments that refuse to be contained.
The stories in Open cover these moments, familiar territory in the hands of most writers, in unfamiliar ways. The interconnectedness of a bus ride in Nepal and a wedding on the shore of Quidi Vidi Lake; the tension between a husband and wife when their infant cries before dawn (who will go to him?) and the husband’s wrenching memory of an early love affair; two friends, one who suffers early in life and the other midway through—these are some of the subjects Lisa Moore treats with her incomparable style.
Drawing on vivid landscapes both interior and exterior, Moore splices together the sudden shocks and subtle realizations that enter her characters’ lives, using the piercing imagery and soulful technique that have won her acclaim from critics and her many fans.
