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The Alligator Report
What makes the noises that always seem to wake us up at 3:00 A.M.? Where can books be bought and sold by the pound? Why will the cubs win the last pennant before Armageddon? What does peanut butter have to do with the Mona Lisa’s smile? Answers to these questions and other adventures await the readers of W.P. Kinsella’s book The Alligator Report .
125 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1985
3 people are currently reading
73 people want to read
About the author
W.P. Kinsella
57 books232 followersWilliam Patrick Kinsella, OC, OBC was a Canadian novelist and short story writer. His work has often concerned baseball and Canada's First Nations and other Canadian issues.
William Patrick Kinsella was born to John Matthew Kinsella and Olive Kinsella in Edmonton, Alberta. Kinsella was raised until he was 10 years-old at a homestead near Darwell, Alberta, 60 km west of the city, home-schooled by his mother and taking correspondence courses. "I'm one of these people who woke up at age five knowing how to read and write," he says. When he was ten, the family moved to Edmonton.
As an adult, he held a variety of jobs in Edmonton, including as a clerk for the Government of Alberta and managing a credit bureau. In 1967, he moved to Victoria, British Columbia, running a pizza restaurant called Caesar's Italian Village and driving a taxi.
Though he had been writing since he was a child (winning a YMCA contest at age 14), he began taking writing courses at the University of Victoria in 1970, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing there in 1974. He travelled down to Iowa and earned a Master of Fine Arts in English degree through the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. In 1991, he was presented with an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Victoria.
Kinsella's most famous work is Shoeless Joe, upon which the movie Field of Dreams was based. A short story by Kinsella, Lieberman in Love, was the basis for a short film that won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film – the Oscar win came as a surprise to the author, who, watching the award telecast from home, had no idea the film had been made and released. He had not been listed in the film's credits, and was not acknowledged by director Christine Lahti in her acceptance speech – a full-page advertisement was later placed in Variety apologizing to Kinsella for the error. Kinsella's eight books of short stories about life on a First Nations reserve were the basis for the movie Dance Me Outside and CBC television series The Rez, both of which Kinsella considers very poor quality. The collection Fencepost Chronicles won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 1987.
Before becoming a professional author, he was a professor of English at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Kinsella suffered a car accident in 1997 which resulted in a long hiatus in his fiction-writing career until the publication of the novel, Butterfly Winter. He is a noted tournament Scrabble player, becoming more involved with the game after being disillusioned by the 1994 Major League Baseball strike. Near the end of his life he lived in Yale, British Columbia with his fourth wife, Barbara (d. 2012), and occasionally wrote articles for various newspapers.
In the year 1993, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2005, he was awarded the Order of British Columbia.
W.P. Kinsella elected to die on September 16, 2016 with the assistance of a physician.
William Patrick Kinsella was born to John Matthew Kinsella and Olive Kinsella in Edmonton, Alberta. Kinsella was raised until he was 10 years-old at a homestead near Darwell, Alberta, 60 km west of the city, home-schooled by his mother and taking correspondence courses. "I'm one of these people who woke up at age five knowing how to read and write," he says. When he was ten, the family moved to Edmonton.
As an adult, he held a variety of jobs in Edmonton, including as a clerk for the Government of Alberta and managing a credit bureau. In 1967, he moved to Victoria, British Columbia, running a pizza restaurant called Caesar's Italian Village and driving a taxi.
Though he had been writing since he was a child (winning a YMCA contest at age 14), he began taking writing courses at the University of Victoria in 1970, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing there in 1974. He travelled down to Iowa and earned a Master of Fine Arts in English degree through the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. In 1991, he was presented with an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Victoria.
Kinsella's most famous work is Shoeless Joe, upon which the movie Field of Dreams was based. A short story by Kinsella, Lieberman in Love, was the basis for a short film that won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film – the Oscar win came as a surprise to the author, who, watching the award telecast from home, had no idea the film had been made and released. He had not been listed in the film's credits, and was not acknowledged by director Christine Lahti in her acceptance speech – a full-page advertisement was later placed in Variety apologizing to Kinsella for the error. Kinsella's eight books of short stories about life on a First Nations reserve were the basis for the movie Dance Me Outside and CBC television series The Rez, both of which Kinsella considers very poor quality. The collection Fencepost Chronicles won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 1987.
Before becoming a professional author, he was a professor of English at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Kinsella suffered a car accident in 1997 which resulted in a long hiatus in his fiction-writing career until the publication of the novel, Butterfly Winter. He is a noted tournament Scrabble player, becoming more involved with the game after being disillusioned by the 1994 Major League Baseball strike. Near the end of his life he lived in Yale, British Columbia with his fourth wife, Barbara (d. 2012), and occasionally wrote articles for various newspapers.
In the year 1993, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2005, he was awarded the Order of British Columbia.
W.P. Kinsella elected to die on September 16, 2016 with the assistance of a physician.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 19, 2014
I found the dedication to Richard Brautigan touching, even though I've never heard of him. I appreciated the author reaching out to a fellow author who inspired him, reinforcing my belief that an honest love of reading always precedes the writing bug. I especially liked the story about a man who smuggles a pony into an attic, the one about a company that deliberately uses motorcycles to disturb people's sleep, the one about selling books by the weight of their content, and the one about the moving shop where people could trade in their pain. The short descriptive/poetic pieces were less appealing to me, probably because I don't usually read that type of fiction. I noticed there were a lot of metaphorical references to fish in the first half; didn't really get why. One or two stories in the middle were too vulgar for my taste, but did open my mind a crack to some unpleasant realities. A very mixed reaction overall. I definitely haven't read a collection like it before.
July 28, 2016
A pleasant & sometimes amusing set of short stories. I think my favorite stories in there were Gabon, The Redemption Center, and The Alligator Report -- With Questions for Discussion.
The stories are in a similar, but more lightweight, style than Richard Brautigan's writing.
Overall, a pleasantly odd little collection.
The stories are in a similar, but more lightweight, style than Richard Brautigan's writing.
Overall, a pleasantly odd little collection.
January 30, 2017
A quick, amusing read for the most part. The dedication to Richard Braughtigan let me know what I was in for and The Alligator Report does show strong Trout Fishing in America influence--Trout Fishing in America Shorty even makes an appearance. I'd have to agree with another reviewer who said that some of this book feels like an inside joke that you are not included on.
March 12, 2021
This was fun enough. W.P. Kinsella is a playful writer, which works great when he stretches out in longer forms. Shoeless Joe and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy are two of my favorite novels, while Box Socials is a Garrison Keillor-style groanfest and one of my least favorite novels. This short story collection kind of splits the difference.
He shouts out Richard Brautigan, which makes sense. However, where Brautigan pretty regularly delivers an easy humanity and surprising tenderness in his short works, Kinsella lands at whimsical cleverness at best and pointless droll vignettes at worst in his own “Brautigans.”
There’s nothing bad in here and the book is a quick, short read. I got some chuckles and the longer stories (ten pages, tops) had some substance, but this just made me want to reread Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn.
He shouts out Richard Brautigan, which makes sense. However, where Brautigan pretty regularly delivers an easy humanity and surprising tenderness in his short works, Kinsella lands at whimsical cleverness at best and pointless droll vignettes at worst in his own “Brautigans.”
There’s nothing bad in here and the book is a quick, short read. I got some chuckles and the longer stories (ten pages, tops) had some substance, but this just made me want to reread Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn.
May 15, 2022
Funny short stories. Perhaps they were dreams of the author? More and more far fetched as the pages turned.
November 7, 2012
Very different from his Alberta Indian reservation stories -- some of the funniest short stories I've ever read. These are almost vignettes, some only a page and a half. IMHO, a mixed bag of some that really work and some that do not -- perhaps because they depict a period in his life of near skid row poverty and equally destitute people. Yet the same joie de vivre in his other stories permeates the best of these stories. Some of them made me really sit up and think "I need to reflect on this"
September 12, 2012
It was a wonderful find for me. A great collection of humourous stories. The very first story, "The Post Office Octopus" is now my favourite short story of all time. I really enjoyed Kinsella's great imagination and playful process in his stories. Reading this book, I find it amazing that he's the same one who wrote Field of Dreams
August 9, 2010
Kinsella is a great author, but this one was a bit of a stretch. Just seemed like he was trying too hard. Excited to read more from him because 'Dance Me Outside' was a Babe Ruth slam over the fence. I still have faith!
Read
February 6, 2015Certainly amusing, and there were a lot of absurd elements that I quite appreciated at the time and were of a style that I later incorporated into my writing. But it didn't have enough staying power for me to rate it.
Want to read
January 11, 2009stamped
August 25, 2011
Reading Kinsella is sometimes like reading a bunch of inside jokes, and you were only included in some of them. These vignettes are still mostly enjoyable, with a couple very good ones.
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August 18, 2017Canadian W.P Kinsella has a sense of humor in every section of his book, The Alligator Report. Silly, sweet, honest, satirical, Kinsella is a fine story teller and good sport espcially when pointing his humor at America. Fun to read.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews