To Read & To Write

The Loss of All Lost Things: Stories is a collection of fifteen short stories by Amina Gautier published in 2016. Each of the stories were featured in other publications, separately, before being collected and placed together within this evocative and meditative book. All of the stories, as you may have guessed, reflect on initial reactions, emotional and/or physical, that affect those who must come to terms, whether or not they'd like to, with loss. The losses in this book range from the disappearance of a child, the separation between partners, the dissolution of trust, the emigration of a family from a community, the broken bridge between friends, death itself... and so much more. Amina Gautier writes from an African-American perspective, offering words that share a glimpse into a world teetering on the edge of a particular subjective vulnerability, yet with such substance that I, while reading, had no doubt that I was secure in her worlds; I was on the inside, looking out. ...

“…assertions skate over the very real — and still dismally insufficient — progress that has been made… in fact, his book often reads like an internal dialogue or debate…” – Michiko Kakutani (New York Times – July 2015) “The narrative focuses the experience of black subjectivity in the visceral, constructed fact of ‘the body’, a device derived from Foucault by way of feminist discourse… Coates admits that he didn’t really know any white people when he was a child: he only saw them on television. That is an indictment of the segregation that still exists in many American neighbourhoods…” – Thomas Chatterton Williams, “Loaded Dice” (London Review Of Books – December 2015) “Between The World And Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates is the second book I’ve read by a black man. The first book I read about black life in America was Richard Wright’s “Black Boy”. The two offer very different perspectives. Wright’s first person autobiographical narrative describes his childhood through adulthood as a haz...