Amina Gautier (At-Risk) is the consummate short story writer. 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.... 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."
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.