Something for Everyone

by Lisa Moore

Internationally celebrated as one of literature’s most gifted stylists, Lisa Moore returns with her third story collection, a soaring chorus of voices, dreams, loves, and lives. Taking us from the Fjord of Eternity to the streets of St. John’s and the swamps of Orlando, these stories show us the timeless, the tragic, and the miraculous hidden in the underbelly of our everyday lives. A missing rock god may have jumped a cruise ship — in the Arctic. A grieving young woman may live next to a serial rapist. A man’s last day on earth replays in the minds of others in a furiously sensual, heartrending fugue. Something for Everyone is Moore at the peak of her prowess — she seems bent on nothing less than rewiring the circuitry of the short story itself.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Canada, Ebooks

304 pages, Paperback

First published September 4, 2018

About the author

Lisa Moore has written two collections of stories, Degrees of Nakedness and Open, as well as a novel, Alligator.

Open and Alligator were both nominated for the Giller Prize. Alligator won the Commonwealth Prize for the Canadian Caribbean Region and the ReLit Award, and Open won the Canadian Authors' Association Jubilee Prize for Short Fiction.

Lisa has also written for television, radio, magazines (EnRoute, The Walrus and Chatelaine) and newspapers (The Globe and Mail and The National Post).

Lisa has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She also studied at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where she became a member of The Burning Rock Collective, a group of St. John's writers.

Reviews

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

What do you want? I ask him in the dining room. They all said about his mother, the Irish whiskey heiress, traipsing from bank to bank, raising the money. They said her dresses and her red hair. (Marconi)

I've stated before that Lisa Moore simply speaks my language – from her intriguing turns of phrase to her kaleidoscopic storytelling – so I was ecstatic to pick up her new book of short stories; probably ended up reading them too fast. Like her other collections, Something for Everyone has frequent moments of brilliance and emotional punch, and like with my other reviews, I find it near impossible to excerpt bits that demonstrate what I mean by that (rereading my reviews of her other collections, I can see what my quotes were meant to capture, but they fall a bit flat out of context). I expect this review to also fail to describe what I love about Moore's writing, but here I go again.

The first story, A Beautiful Flare, was probably my favourite (and was first published in The Walrus as “The Shoe Emporium”, were anyone inclined to read it for themselves), and it mashes together the stories of three coworkers at a shoe store. Every line was intriguing to me, each character equally fascinating, and as Moore slices and splices so seamlessly between the three, I knew that no excerpt could possibly give a flavour of the whole. Here's my attempt:

The hole in her nylons that Marty has torn has a creep, it creeps, widening in an oval big as the palm of her hand, peeling back or unravelling, a gazillion filaments, small and laddering down the leg, invisibly giving, breaking, no, not breaking exactly, more evaporating and it is her desire, a spreading, licking, a hole in the nylons because even though she comes to work put together because what are these stockings but a petroleum product made as thin as a lick of light, tickling, so that her skin pudges through, like dough rising or anything that rises, and then the keystone shoebox is knocked maybe half an inch with each – let’s take a moment to acknowledge the paradox – very gentle, controlled but forceful, holy thrust/bang, tinged with maybe a little love for her, however ephemeral, so that the tightly jammed shoebox, maybe twelve shoeboxes above her head, juts itself out of the tightly packed wall of shoeboxes that rises from floor to ceiling all the way down the very narrow storage closet, and keeps jutting farther and farther with each lovemaking rock of Marty’s hips and buttock contraction and the tilt of his head, bent as if in prayer, but also, pouf, blowing a mouthful of her hair away from his lips because, he stops just for a sec, because a hair, one of her hairs, seems to have gotten into his mouth and they’re both caught up in the micro-work of what is it? A hair? Phwah-phwah, he’s trying to get it off his tongue, and there he has it, have you got it? Pinched between finger and thumb and saliva shine, he rubs it away, and the engorging freckled dong deep inside, now, slow at first but deliberately slow, sea cucumber slow, in the deep cold is what they have down there, holes in the bottom of the ocean where everything is eyeless, groping but sentient, and phosphorescent and just as if they were not in the mall, as if the blow-out sale were not in progress, as if you couldn’t buy one, get the second pair half-price, as if Steve would not be in here any second to get a load of shoes, slowly and at the same time, warp speed, she is kissing his white eyelids.

As that demonstrates, many of the stories are about relationships, and while Moore can be graphic (but somehow not lewd) about sex, she can also be very funny:

What he'd said when he met Trisha's girlfriend: I'm available when you gals want to take it to the next level. He'd made fists low, near his waist, and wrenched them back and forth while jutting his hips, twice to the left, twice to the right, mock-wincing with each, you know it, anus pulse, and repeating, Oh yeah, oh yeah. And then a few lines of Loverboy's “Turn Me Loose”. (The Fjord of Eternity)

(I don't know why Moore had to describe that as an “anus pulse”, but it made me snort; it takes the boor down a peg.) Another favourite story was The Viper's Revenge, and it perfectly demonstrates how Moore can come at a subject sideways; the gut punch you don't see coming. It begins as the story of a librarian from St. John's who travels to Orlando for a conference, and once she notices the Caretaker cleaning her hotel's pool, we get a look inside his head as well as he thinks about his wife and children and the happy – if impoverished – life they've led. As the librarian hooks up with a local musician, we see the Caretaker's family life; consider that although both parents work, they still rely on the wife's brother to pay half their two room apartment's rent to sleep on the couch while getting his PhD; but the laughs and love and tight relationships make the close quarters look enviable. Before we realise that this is actually a story about the mass killings at the Pulse nightclub, we see the Caretaker and his wife talking to a surgeon about a vasectomy (which, although impossible for me to describe why, feels like the essence of the story; maybe because it's the only interaction we witness between the privileged and the underclass of the happiest place on earth?):

Back during the pre-op consultation the doctor had slouched in his chair, not even unslouching while he sketched on a pad and then sent the pad spinning over the desk to the Caretaker. The doctor's head cranked to the side on his shoulder, his jaw jacked up by a blue-veined fist, his elbow resting on the plastic arm of the office chair, his legs yanking the swivel chair side to side with a two-toned squeak, until the square jaw nudged off the knuckles and the doctor was lifted from the haze of his lassitude, blinking as if to assert his presence back in the room, the Caretaker lost in the ballpoint illustration, the testicles and the tubes going to the testicles and where the cut happens, a slash dug into the paper with such force it punctured the surface of the pad with a tiny hole, which, the doctor swore it was a foolproof procedure.

Moore always captures these fine details about folks – and if it doesn't read as fascinating, I'll accept the fault as mine for excerpting out of context. In this collection she writes about average people in Newfoundland, and also Marconi's famous attempt to send the first transatlantic radio message from St. John's Signal Hill (told, intriguingly, from the POV of a hotel waitress), and a story from Santa Claus on Christmas Eve (incidentally explaining the quantum mechanics behind his work). Frequent repetitions – ATVs, Gyproc, and BIC pens; sex workers, separation, and syringes; St. John's, Fort Mac, and Iceland – throughout the stories tell us the kind of things on Moore's mind, and always, she has something interesting and important to say about how people live. This is what I like and I'll happily await whatever Moore comes out with next.

[Penny (Literary Hoarders) · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like 2.5 stars for me? Once again, the quirky and eclectic nature of the Giller Prize judges are showing through with the selection of this story collection for the Longlist (as was Zolitude for me).

I, obviously now that I've read two of the story collections from the 2018 Longlist, prefer a more traditionally told short story. While these weren't as "out there" as Zolitude's, many would slip down that tunnel of strangeness for me. I felt some of the stories repeated themselves too. Some started out strongly for me, and I would smile or laugh out loud, but then they would oddly flit from one thought to a very different thought within that particular story.

I hope the rest of my planned Giller reading proves to be a more enjoyable experience. And perhaps I'll wait until the shortlist is released before picking up another one. At the start of this year, I read a GG finalist collection, All the Beloved Ghosts and thoroughly enjoyed that one, definitely over these past two I've just finished reading.

[Sue (s.j. Shalgaire) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved Lisa Moore's writing.This my first venture into her work. Vivid gritty imagery. She exhibits brilliant ability to reveal life's dirty laundry in everyday, her characters navigate through their relationships with love, pain, and revelations. A master, I believe in portrayal of raw emotions, shifting landscapes of being human. I'm particularly drawn to dark edged literary fiction and if you're a fan of Canadian literary genre, I highly recommend this read -- her most recent short story collection. She tends towards constant shifts in time frames within the narrative which might present jarring to some. I appreciated it, and felt it spoke to her level of expertise in her craft.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lisa Moore’s short fiction collection, Something for Everyone, is nothing less than a virtuoso performance, a grouping of incisive modern-day tales that propels the reader through a splintered, emotionally simmering, non-linear reality that is always surprising and often shocking. Moore plays with structure, chronology and perspective in ways that few writers dare (at the moment, only George Saunders comes to mind), darting back and forth in time, piling abrupt transitions on conversational non-sequiturs on slippery shifts in construction. Is she daring her reader to follow along, or give up, at their peril? But anyone who does give up is missing out on what a truly gifted and original storyteller working at peak form has to offer. Moore’s stories are not only structurally ground-breaking but geographically and socially adventurous as well, observing few if any boundaries. Her characters include professionals, mothers and fathers, teens, criminals and sex workers; her chief setting is Newfoundland, but several stories range farther afield. The opener, “A Beautiful Flare” explores the working dynamic among employees of a shoe store with a sales award on the line. “The Fjord of Eternity” follows Trisha’s search for an insurance-claim fraudster. The tragic backdrop of “The Viper’s Revenge” is the Pulse nightclub massacre: a young librarian, attending a conference in Orlando, indulges in an impulsive sexual encounter, but without explanation the narrative swivels, and for much of the story we’re reading about the caretaker of the hotel where the librarian is staying, and his family. And “Skywalk,” which takes place in St. John’s in the midst of a rash of rapes, tells of university student Chelsea’s quest for a suitable apartment, ranging across her entire life in the process. Moore’s prose is razor-sharp, as are her observations regarding human desire and motivation. There is nothing sentimental in these pages. These are characters who have grit in their shoes, go hungry at night and sometimes find themselves in danger through no fault of their own. Lisa Moore is no ordinary writer: her approach to storytelling is radical and startling, but never gimmicky. Undeniably, Something for Everyone makes demands of the reader, with its loosely plotted stories that veer in unexpected directions without warning. But the challenge the book presents is worth accepting. Its rewards are too numerous to count.

[Michael Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Something for Everyone taught me a few things about my preferences in literature. I finished the first story, didn't much care for it and then looked on the back of the book where it described Lisa Moore as a celebrated stylist. Not totally sure what a it meant to be a stylist writer, I looked it up. Stylist basically means an author with a distinct or unique style of note. This made sense to me and helped to prepare me for the remainder of the book.
I try to seek out different styles of writing by unique voices. I can't complain about this book in that regard. It's certainly unique. Almost every short story in this collection has one or two ideas or images that are really strong, or compelling that get completely buried under a style that is maddening.
A story will frequently start out small and intimate with one or two characters being the focus of the story. As the story goes on, those characters will start internalizing events that involve other characters. Then the story will switch to follow those side characters. And throughout all of this, there is no punctuation when two people speak to each other. For the whole book. So you'll be on a side character story thinking about something that may (or may not) relate to the main characters story and then it'll jump back into the main story and you'll have no idea where you are or what is happening. Worse, you won't care much to put in the effort to follow what is happening.
There are a few times when the style works in the books favor but those moments are too few and too far between.
After I had finished it, I sat down to write out my preference of the stories. There are ten stories and I couldn't remember more than four. You could argue that I didn't put in the effort and try to meet the book in the middle, but with an engaging book, it should come to you.

[Ellie Red · Rating 5 out of 5]

''Women must obey the curfew, stay
inside when it gets dark.

Unless they wanted the rapist to catch them
Unless they wanted a blade at their throat
Unless they wanted to collapse in the emergency room
Unless they wanted the cuts and bruises photographed
Unless they wanted to be asked what they were doing outside
Unless they wanted to take antidepressants
Unless they wantes to panic... for the rest of their lives.''

Summary:
The book "Something for Everyone" is a collection of short stories, which centers around the lives of various characters living in Canada.
The book explores themes such as love, loss and the interconnectedness that exists among people. What similarities has a young lady who experiences the complexity of adolescence with a woman who probably lives next door to a rapist and mourns the death of her father, or a little boy who wants to save his grandmother but has no money and thinks to commit armed robbery but this doesn't happen at last? The common element of all these stories is the need for human connection.

Review:
The book has been honored with the awards:
Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award
Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction

The author begins each story as if opening the curtain in a theater. It starts with a scene and the same scene ends the story. In between is a sequence of associative thoughts, where the narrative jumps from one memory to another, from one thought to another. This can confuse the reader and makes them wonder how they ended up where they did. As a result the stories cannot be read on the fly , they must be read carefully and then digested.

Thoughts:
A book I would read again and highly recommend. The book is titled, ''Something for Everyone'' literally. You may not identify with one story, but you will definetely find pieces of yourself in the next one.

[Jacquelyn Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

In true Lisa Moore style, Something for Everyone is powerful, human, and truly gutting in its emotional depth. Moore can write a sentence like no other, making each one count.

The stories themselves weave and drift, creating intense atmosphere and emotionality, and sometimes a sense of disconnect. While I enjoy the story within a story within a story that often defines Moore’s style, it can become a bit repetitive in this collection, you sometimes begin to lose your sense of the story inside the details.

[Quill · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book that inspired me to become a writer. Revelatory in the way that it writes about the city I live in, the city I grew up in. Good stories can be told here. An invaluable addition to the library

[Lester · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining and interesting stories..thought provoking too. All in good ways.
I especially enjoyed "Skywalk"..the ending put a BIG smile on my face!!
Thankx Lisa Moore.

[Maggie Burton · Rating 5 out of 5]

In “Something for Everyone” Moore writes dynamic prose about the current moment in western society broadly while holding a magnifying glass up to Newfoundland and Labrador specifically. She considers the effects of over a century of income inequality in St. John’s, she shows us what happens when you don’t have the opportunity to earn a living wage, or when budget cuts dismantle the public service, or when your neighbours turn on you because of your class or race or sexual identity.

Moore exposes our fear of losing everything, our fear of economic collapse and what that can do to communities in “Visitation”. In “Marconi” she brings the reader back in time to the turn of the 20th century into the lives of Government House staff and the elite who visit town, while in “Lighting up the Dark” an underage waitstaff at a high-end downtown restaurant risks everything to get money to pay for his grandmother’s lifesaving dental surgery. In “Guard of What” and “Skywalk” Moore exposes the cowardice and other factors that fuel the casual and pervasive acts of violence against women in the province. She searches for justice for her characters throughout the collection and implores the reader to consider looking more closely at the root causes of poverty in our communities.

Her characters are acutely aware of the cost of living and are anxious about how they are going to access affordable housing and re-enter the workforce and get their stamps for the winter months. They are mothers, daughters, community workers, fathers, strangers, neighbours who help each other out with a scoop of coffee or a cigarette or a voice on the other line while walking alone in the dark.

Moore treats her characters with respect, trust, empathy and love and treats her readers with brilliant imagery and scenes that will stick with us forever.

[Tiguidou · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are details in these stories that are so banal and so human that they put lumps in my throat. In that way, Moore's stories don't always read like fiction. They're raw, honest, and real, and that's what keeps me turning the pages.
I greatly admire Moore's ability to braid characters and time so seamlessly. That takes skill!
"The Viper's Revenge" and "Skywalk" were gave-me-the-shivers favourites.

[Olivia Shintani · Rating 1 out of 5]

Could not finish. It’s called “something for everyone” but these short stories made no sense to me lol

[Anne Logan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyone gets excited when Lisa Moore releases a short story collection, mainly because she hasn’t in a while, and it’s the form she ‘broke out’ with. I’ve only read her novels thus far, but I love her writing, so I knew I would enjoy this newest group of stories titled Something for Everyone-I was not disappointed!


The title is a perfect one for a collection of stories, although I would argue not as applicable to this particular work. If we’re going to get literal, reading an anthology of short stories by different writers would most likely yield ‘something for everyone’, because Moore does have a particular (and admirable) style of writing in her stories. Each story is about a moment, or a series of moments in one person’s life. Setting and plot are secondary to the person or people that inhabit Moore’s worlds, which is the kind of writing I prefer. Even when a story is centered around a newsworthy moment from the recent past (the massacre at Pulse Nightclub in Florida for instance), the story focuses on the life of the people that morning, the mundate facts of what they ate for breakfast, what their schedule typically entailed on any given day, etc. The shooting itself is not described, rather, the reactions of the people close to it are.

Because I’m writing this in December (although lord knows it won’t be posted until much later!) I should also mention there’s a lovely Christmas story included. It begins with a young man about to commit a crime in order to save a family member, but instead, Santa Claus steps in to reverse time and prevent this trail of sadness from even beginning, all by helping an old woman fight an oral infection (again, so applicable to my situation right now!). It also details Santa’s ability to surpass the miracles needed to do what he does best, which I really enjoyed – a truly unique, and somewhat humorous story.

I really liked the story “Lovers with the Intensity I’m Talking About” because a) what a great title! And b) it was really engaging, even though it was sometimes difficult to tell what was going on, the constant return to the present day in front of a grocery store sliding door felt so visceral to me. I could picture the scene exactly in my mind, and even imagine myself in the same way decades into this life. Moore’s ability to predict life at that stage, one that is past children and on the verge of losing one’s partner is haunting but impressive.

One of the great strengths of this collection is the range of ages the characters illustrate, and regardless of the situation, I found myself empathizing with each and every one of them. Perhaps another pattern I can discern is that many characters are disadvantaged in one way or another, their problems lay out starkly in front of us as we turn the pages.

My reviews of short story collections always feel a bit broken up, although in my defense, it’s hard to tie them together without feeling like I’m over-generalizing. So, if this was review hard to follow I apologize, but in case it isn’t obvious yet, I highly recommend this book.

To see the rest of my reviews, please visit my blog:
https://ivereadthis.com/

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully crafted short stories!

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lisa Moore, "Something for Everyone." House of Anansi Press, 2018.

In my quest to read as much Newfoundland literature as I can, I have read quite a bit of Lisa Moore, most recently her first short story collection, "Degrees of Nakedness" (1995) but also two of her novels, "Alligator" (2005) and "February" (2009). She has won literary prizes in Newfoundland and Canada, and she has received some attention internationally (Mann Booker Prize, International Dublin Literary Award). She is part of The Burning Rock Collective of writers, which formed in St. John’s in the 1990s. She is a superb storyteller and deserves wider recognition.

In "Something for Everyone" and her other fiction, Lisa Moore writes of contemporary urban Newfoundland, mostly St. John’s. She is the obverse of a writer like Michael Crummey, who writes of mythic, epic, and tragic Newfoundland. The nine stories in this collection connect to Newfoundland in some of the following ways: the particular geography of St. John’s, outports, the cod moratorium, emigration, Ft. MacMurray and the Alberta tar sands, moose, Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN), Marconi and the development of transatlantic telegraphy, blizzards and snow. Moore is superb at capturing the middle class, working class, working poor, the down and out, and the everyday scrabble and struggle. She also deftly weaves, layers, and/or juxtaposes narratives lines and character arcs that both converge and diverge.

The Stories:

“A Beautiful Flare” is set in a shoe store in the Avalon Mall at the end of sales contest for the employees (prize: a trip to see "Kinky Boots" in Toronto). The main characters are three employees: Cathy, the store manager; Steve, the 42 year old salesman, who is very good at his job; Marty, the other salesperson. Complicating bits. Cathy and Marty had sex in the back storeroom, and Steve walked in on them; the sex is really good for Cathy and surprising for Marty, who is very gay and not attracted to women. Marty lives with his grandmother, who is a retired biologist from MUN; she dies accidentally, stuck in a portable sauna, steamed to death, or perhaps it was suicide(?). Marty discovered her and is grieving, after which he has sex with Cathy. Steve has made bad choices in his life: fishing two days after the cod moratorium went into effect and getting caught drunk in a dory full of cod; hitting a moose; didn’t finish high school, screwed up in Alberta (too much debt). In the end, Steve sacrifices his sales advantage to Cathy, because he’s self-destructive? makes bad choices? is a good guy who cares for others? Moore offers no resolution. These are simply characters getting by and making choices, coping or not.

“The Visitation” is a ghost story, a divorce story, a story of poor decisions and circumstances. This is in part an outport story (What’s an outport? Look it up).There are economic difficulties, a fire at a fish processing plant. Is the ghost story a piece of magic realism or the product of a psychological breakdown? Is the man who stalks and nearly rapes the main character real or a vision/nightmare? Is the end, the ex-husband shows up, a sign of reconciliation after a scene of near rape?. After so much weirdness some normalcy? Again, Moore offers no resolution.

“The Fjord of Eternity”is a story about two insurance fraud detectives, one who travels to Florida to follow a fraudster and the other who goes on a cruise north out of Newfoundland to find someone who has faked his death and disappeared. The former is a routine investigation which ends routinely, while the latter investigation reveals a fascinating character who is well known and beloved on board the cruise ship as well as on the cruise route, because he is entertaining, energetic and revitalizing for those who encounter him. He has become a legend out in the wilds of the north. The investigator is so enchanted that when she discovers him hiding in the Fjord of Eternity (Greenland) she doesn’t report him.

“Marconi” is a story about the discovery of Trans-Atlantic telegraphy, where a telegraphic signal was received with a kite antenna flown from the top of Signal Hill in St. John’s. But rather than tell an epic tale of scientific progress, Moore narrates the day of discovery from the perspective of a young woman who is maid to Marconi. The story intercuts between Marconi and the men who are building and flying the antennae-kite and the girl and the cook. Moore describes the everyday duties and concerns of the women (what and when to serve Marconi, his behaviors, prepping rabbit for a meal, the girl’s pregnancy), which anchor the story and outweigh the mens’ actions, which are mysterious to the women. An ordinary tale supplants the epic story of scientific progress and technological victory.

“Guard of What”centers on a traffic circle in St. John’s across from the home of the protagonist where sex workers and their clients meet and negotiate. The protagonist, a single woman recently divorced, is sometimes bothered, but not too much, by all the illicit activity. She endeavors to stay on its margins as she goes about her everyday business, like walking the dog. She is concerned with one woman who seems to be disabled and one of whose clients is stalking her aggressively. The story ends with the stalker and some his friends trapping the woman on the traffic island as they drive around it fast, furiously, and noisily. The protagonist would help but is helpless in the face of all that aggressive, mechanical male power, and she has called her ex-husband looking for help. Women are still caught in a man’s world, dependent on and threatened by men.

“Lovers with the Intensity I’m Talking About”: Moore usually narrates through a female character, but here she narrates through a man, who is in his sixties and a financial advisor to very wealthy clients. In the story, he is trying to make sense of a few of the strong, independent women in his life, also about his age: his wife, a lover, a colleague. It is a reflective story, taking place when he has returned from an international trip from India to St. John’s in the midst of a blizzard. He focuses on the women’s strengths, talents, energy, self-confidence, and independence (no need for a man). He is not freaked out or angry or threatened. He is curious, acting as if he is exploring a foreign culture that he just discovered has been surrounding him his entire life. As he reminisces about the women, his memories are pleasant, but he is also aware of a steely resolve. A few details about the end: the story winds down with the protagonist encountering his former lover at a supermarket in the midst of the blizzard. She does not drive and is waiting for a taxi; they have a pleasant catch-up, reestablishing their longtime friendship; but when he offers her a ride home, she demurs for the taxi. He then receives a text from his colleague, who informs him that she is taking over one of his big accounts. He is not angry, he does not feel caught or cheated. He simply reflects on the capacity of strong women. I wonder if Lisa Moore is writing this character as she would hope all men would be, not resentful but thoughtful and accepting.

“The Challenges and Rewards of Re-Entering the Workforce”: Moore is superb at portraying the fraught difficulties of life and how everyone runs like rats through mazes, mazes over which they have no control, mazes which run their economic lives to exploit them and extort as much profit from them as possible. The economic game which cannot be won by your average working stiff. The story title is for an essay assignment, taught by an adjunct, in a course meant to retrain/recycle people with new/different skills for the workforce. The story makes clear from various characters and contexts just how the system is gamed to exploit the worker.

“Lighting Up the Dark” is a Christmas tale, not the realism I expect from Moore but a funny fantasy with Santa Claus as the narrator who claims that he is real and explains at length how he uses the space-time continuum to travel around the world on Christmas. There is a realistic story line in which Santa intervenes. A 14 year old has been raised by his grandmother, and she needs expensive oral surgery to remove teeth, deal with severe facial swelling, and a nasty infection. She doesn’t have much money, and the 14 year old works as a dishwasher in a restaurant. The bad luck: the grandmother’s infection has gotten serious, and the grandson trips in bacon fat on the floor of the kitchen, falls and breaks a stack of plates, after which he freaks out and leaves knowing that he will be fired. In desperation, he decides to hold up a shop in the Avalon Mall, which he would do with a syringe he finds in the street. In response to the spiraling bad luck, Santa lands on the roof with thousands of reindeer, remember the time-space continuum, which collapses the roof and then the mall floor. More bad luck, Santa! The good luck: Santa reverses all the bad luck. He turns time backward to repair the mall, sends the 14 year old back to the restaurant to not trip, and he alleviates the grandmother’s infection and tooth problems. Pathos, spectacle and repair! The story has a resolution, a happy ending!

“Skyway”is quite long story, more a novela, and is the best example in the book of Moore’s talent for weaving, layering, and juxtaposing convergent and divergent story lines and character arcs. This network of narrative and fictive stuff is organized pretty simply around the main character, Chelsea, crossing a skyway in St. John’s late at night to get home. Around that central action, Moore develops a host of interconnected narrative threads. There has been a series of rapes in town, making everyone concerned and the city seem a dangerous place to navigate. Chelsea is looking for an apartment or room rent. She comes from a dysfunctional family, her father committed suicide, and now she is attending university to be trained as a nurse, which ultimately leads to a job in a hospital. The boy whom she encounters before she crosses the skyway agrees to stay on the phone with her as she crosses in case of trouble; they remain in contact via phone afterwards, until they both lose their phones and lose track of each other, but they meet again a few years later at the hospital where she works. There is the rapist’s story. He works highway jobs and is a member of a gang that runs a prostitution ring, all of whom live next door to Chelsea for awhile. He escapes one police raid but is caught trying to escape Newfoundland on the ferry at Port-aux-Basques. There is the story of one of the sex worker whom Chelsea befriends and who talks of her life and family. I could add a few more story lines, but the point is that in all the weaving, layering, and juxtaposing Moore develops her characters and makes them sympathetic rather than flat and dismissable. She really is a wonderful storyteller.

[Magnus Briar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lisa Moore's Something for Everyone is like finding a Newfoundland kitchen party that's been going on for decades – you walk in mid-convo, everyone's a bit slushed on emotion, and somehow you end up staying until the sun comes up over Trinity Bay.

The title is mostly not lying. Moore's got this wicked ability to write about specific people doing specific things, but somehow making it all feel about you, the reader. These characters are messier than the slop off an Irish breakfast and twice as satisfying. The themes of aging, raging, families, loneliness and lost love, and more, are universal and well-plumbed in.

As all grand and worthy writers, Moore scribbles like a chronic eavesdropper and her prose hits you upside the head lovingly. The words on these pages are thick, sweet, and impossible to rush. Her sentences meander and loop back on themselves the way people actually talk when they're trying to work through something complicated.

The emotional range here is Trans-Canada Highway broad. Humour and heartache are laced together like a cold-day quilt and she's got this sneaky way of tucking profound moments inside the pockets of ordinary ones, like hiding a twenty in your winter coat. You're reading along, thinking you're just following some crowd through their day, then suddenly you're drowning in North Atlantic feelings ya didn't see coming.

What's nifty about Moore's writing is how she writes like a person from a particular place but about people from all over. Her work explodes with that charming combination of dark humour and stubborn tenderness. Her characters endure and, occasionally, mature. Trés human.

Now, I gotta level with you about the rough patches. There is a bit of unevenness at times. Some stories feel like sailing through a storm. Others feel like a forgettable fishing trip. The pacing shifts between stories can be somewhat, though not aggressively, stark.

Moore's writing style is also drenched enough to drown a plate of pancakes. All that poetic language and fragmented storytelling creates this dreamy, underwater feeling that's either completely mesmerizing or mildly frustrating, depending on your mood. For me, it was fucking miraculous. For you, it might piss you off. TBD, I guess.

The emotional weight of the explored themes can be crushing too. There's humour worked in but it is worked in to a collection that has its heavier moments. Not gory or gross but maybe a bit grim. A tad grey. Enough that, by the end, you do feel like you need a chuckle.

Like a writer with wisdom in abundance, Moore knows that the most interesting stories happen in the spaces between what people say and what the hell they really mean. Her characters are constantly trying to communicate across these weighty and universal gaps that separate us up – generational, cultural, emotional – and sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don't. That feels honest, heartbreaking and hopeful.

Moore's got the rare gift of the gab, making the ordinary feel extraordinary without ever making it feel false. She writes with a kind of magic that does not veer too far into witchcraft. Though I would not consider this a contemporary classic, or a must-read-before-you-croak, it is a more than worthwhile read. I will keep an eye peeled for her other works.

[Anna Richland · Rating 2 out of 5]

A relative gave me a wide-ranging selection of books for Christmas (from Washington Black and French Exit to this short story collection), pushing me outside my usual genre fiction tastes. This short story collection was as the pretty far end of the stylized lit fic spectrum, at least in my opinion. Lots of present tense first person with very individually styled sentences. At least for me, sentences that are so carefully crafted slow me down and that's not how I like to read fiction. Nonfiction, sure, slow and sentence by sentence, especially if I'm researching. But I like to inhale fiction, let it really envelop me, and I can't do that if each sentence is its own entity to admire or decipher. Here's an example, picked at random by opening to a page and looking at the middle:

"Nobody says hey to me, the Caretaker's wife hisses, into the microwave. She is vigorous with the mascara wand in the little tube, she bends again to put mascara on the other eye, looking into the chrome and the snake, it's a viper, the forked tongue, on her bare back, the viper's head shoots to the side when she shifts her weight, scoping out the kitchen with its evil blue eyes."

So, while I realize that will absolutely work for some readers, it's not my jam. There were several snippets or paragraphs that were creepy or amazing or both (the grandma's death in the final story, Skywalk, was one of the most terrifying things I've read since the book World War Z). And Newfoundland comes through spectacularly -- we've been there, and it was like taking that amazing trip again. So those are the reasons why even though this was a DNF because I skipped through or over several stories, I still gave it 2 stars.

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

I tried. I tried so hard with this, but in the end I'm forced to admit that no aspect of this book has stuck with me. This is especially due to two things: voice, and Moore's stylistic manner of writing without strict dialogue tags (ie: quotation marks differentiating between speech and prose). More to the point, Moore's characters are all Moore—meaning, there's no real variation in tone, style, or voice. All her characters, regardless of age, gender, race, etc. feel identical to one another, and largely interchangeable. Throw in the decision to not mark dialogue using basic grammatical tools (like, say, any degree of punctuation) and you're left with ten largely directionless stories that feel more like run-on thoughts than distinct narratives. And none of them have the character to carve out emotional stakes or identities of their own.

Putting it bluntly, this collection feels bored with itself.

This is my second Moore book. I read "Caught" some years back, and felt largely the same as I do now: that while the author has a strong grasp of technical craft, the muted, almost emotionless feel of their work left me stripped of catharsis or a sense of consequence for anything that happened in that book. Sadly, my feelings after having read this collection are unchanged—if anything, I think I've come to realize one very important thing: Moore's writing is not for me. Not at all.

[Dylan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sadly, Something for Everyone suffers from inconsistency to the same degree that nearly every collection of short stories suffers. There are some really great stories in this collection but there are just as many that fall flat.

I think Moore's biggest challenge is that she sometimes attempts too much with too little and misses as a result. There certainly are some unique stories that turn the form on its head but there are others that attempt grandeur and shirk their responsibilities.

Collections are always challenging to judge.

[Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I heard Lisa Moore speak on the radio with Sheilagh Rogers and I was intrigued and decided to read the book. However I have again realized that short stories are not a format I enjoy. I found the stories disjointed while reading them and there seemed to be a lot of switching between tenses. I felt confused reading the stories. I also found that at times details were repeated in the stories and this added to my confusion. I almost stopped reading it part way through but I am one of those people who need to finish. I will read other books by the author but not of short story format.

[Jan Morrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moore never disappoints. Her writing is magical - quick and fluid as mercury. This collection of stories reveals another facet of her brilliance, with her habit of looping back and back on a story as if she were a court embroiderer over-stitching each story element until we feel its meaning. With a deft hand she conjures up a sort of Newfoundland magical realism that reminds this reader it is time to read Marques' 100 Years of Solitude again.

[Benjamin Kahn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got about 2/3 of the way through the sixth story when I gave up on this book. It wasn't terrible, but I had yet to hit a story that I really cared about. I didn't relate or like any of the characters, and I found a certain sameness to the tales, with the possible exception of "The Fjord of Eternity." This is my second shot at trying to read a Lisa Moore book, and I think that experiment might be over.

[Jessica B · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book but I only had one moment where I was really wowed. The style was really interesting and it mostly worked for me, although sometimes I wished the other would just pick a perspective and stick with it. I also had some of those moments I tend to have with short stories where I finished the story and just didn’t feel like I “got it”. Overall though I enjoyed it, and looked forward to picking it up to continue reading.

[Kaitlyn R. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Intetesting circular narrative/stream of conciousness style writting, some very poetic turns of phrase, and dialogue that straddles *too* natural. Unfortunately it was also discustingly allosexual and horny.
Not even sexy or romantic horniness, just banal and relentlessly mundane lust. always lurking around the bend ready to ruin my listening experience. surely that can't be how people go about their lives, is it...? Oh well. It's a shame, but some books, ironically, aren't for everyone.

[Chade66 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Constant jumping from character to character, no flow, every time I started to get into a story thread, it popped to someone else and by the time I got back to Steve/Adrian I had lost track of what I was reading. Didn't make it through the first story, definitely not my style.

Your mileage may vary. Also no dialogue tags.

[Louisa Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories mostly from Newfoundland, I like Lisa Moore but it was all in the middle of the night, I have vague recollections of cold hands and windswept parking lots and detailed observations of tiny everyday things which thereby become important and maybe beautiful, if I could only recall what any of them were.

[Lori Bamber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished it and thought about finding time to read it again. Lots of challenging short story experimentation in this one, particularly in the first stories - I found that I loved it more as I went along and surrendered my ideas of the way short stories should unfold.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Canada's Flannery O'Connor! I'm not a big fan of short stories, but I read everything Lisa Moore writes. This is an outstanding gathering of stories that teeter between the ordinary and the grotesque.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

A book of short stories. Although I loved the familiar Canadian settings I found the writing to scattered for me to really enjoy and ultimately none of the characters stayed with me once I turned the page.

[K.R. Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lisa Moore's story collection SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE is the first of her books I've read, and I'm plainly late to the party. Her circuitous narratives drew me in with their high-def depictions of artfully chosen moments in their characters' lives.