The Loss of All Lost Things

Book excerpt: Fiction. Winner of the Florida Authors and Publishers Association Award. Winner of a Royal Palm Literary Award. Winner of the Chicago Public Library's 21st Century Award. Winner of a Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Fiction. Winner of the International Latino Book Award in Most Inspirational Fiction. Amina Gautier's THE LOSS OF ALL LOST THINGS won the Elixir Press 2014 Fiction Award. It is a short story collection that illuminates the beauty that can be found in inconsolable loss. Gautier leads us through terrible reality but leaves us with the promise of hope and redemption. Contest judge, Phong Nguyen had this to say about it: "Literary fiction that grips us and won't let us go is notoriously rare. To offer us complex emotional experience and riveting narrative momentum, and then to leave the reader in contemplation of its sophisticated themes and subtle weave of objective correlatives... that is the stuff of literary greatness, of art that demands to be read in conversation with the canon....Gautier's stories have you by the throat, and they surprise you with their mercy."