Amina Gautier is the consummate short story writer. Winner of a slew of awards, including the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, she has published more than 80 stories in various magazines and two book-length collections (At-Risk and Now We Will Be Happy). She was asked in a 2014 interview in the Nervous Breakdown if, like many fiction writers with story collections, she planned to turn to a novel next. She replied: "I write what interests me and nourishes my creative spirit.... I'm not interested in following a path that has been trodden by others; it kills the grass." Sure enough, her new book is again a collection of stories--perhaps her best--and it has already won the Elixir Press Award. While not expressly a collection of "linked" stories, The Loss of All Lost Things collects pieces that focus on characters whose lives have been upended in some way by loss. They lose their spouses and children, their confidence, their dreams, their careers. In the title story, a couple's oldest son has been abducted and his mother sits alone in his bedroom where "she is free to count her [life's] losses... a birthday card with a ten dollar bill taped inside... her first ever camera... her virginity.... Each loss is a reprimand, a reminder of her helplessness; each loss is a disorienting thing... its own little death."
An Afro-Puerto Rican and native New Yorker with degrees from Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania, Gautier fills her stories with multi-racial academics, parents, single moms, grad students, administrators and small children. Whether navigating life in big cities or small towns (including a prep school in Massachusetts "where the towns were named for fields: Northfield, Greenfield, Springfield, Deerfield"), they must struggle to overcome their losses. Silence and brevity is often the language of couples who can't speak of their rift, like the academic husband in "Resident Lover" who reacts to a written goodbye from his wife: "She was declaring her separation from him.... She wanted nothing from him. She did not love him anymore. He didn't write back." Gautier also has a sharp eye for the details that define characters and scenes--often listing them in series, such as this description in "Directory Assistance" of women riding to work on a Philadelphia bus: "hair pulled neatly back into fake buns, falls, or clumps of curls, their bodies bundled in bulky trench-like coats, their feet in gym sneakers... piles of bags in their laps... books with the words Scandal, Temptress, Captive, and Seduction on the covers."
Quiet, subtle, observant--the stories of The Loss of All Lost Things are pictures of sadness that enrich an understanding of separation and despair. One after another they do what short fiction does so well: capture a character, scene or place that together are much bigger than they seem. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.
Shelf Talker: Amina Gautier's third collection of stories focuses on the debilitating effects of separation and loss on a diverse group of everyday people in everyday places.