Alligator and Other Stories, Dima Alzayat
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Alligator and Other Stories

Author: Dima Alzayat

Narrator: Jeed Saddy

Unabridged: 6 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/13/2021

Categories: Fiction, Short Stories


Synopsis

The award-winning stories in Dima Alzayat's collection, Alligator and Other Stories, are luminous and tender, whether dealing with a woman preforming burial rites for her brother in "Ghusl," or the great-aunt struggling to explain cultural identity to her niece in "Once We Were Syrians." Alzayat's stories are rich and relatable, chronicling a sense of displacement through everyday scenarios. There is the intern in pre-#MeToo Hollywood of "Only Those Who Struggle Succeed," or the "dangerous" women of "The Daughters of Manāt" who struggle to assert their independence. The title story, "Alligator," is a masterpiece of historical reconstruction and intergenerational trauma, told in an epistolary format 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, challenges the demands of American assimilation and its limits. Contains mature themes.

Author Bio

Dima Alzayat was born in Damascus, Syria, grew up in San Jose, California, and now lives in Manchester, UK. 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. Her stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Bristol Short Story Award Anthology, Bridport Prize Anthology, and Enizagam.

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