Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

THE BEST THAT YOU CAN DO

Amina Gautier

The winner of the 2023 Soft Skull-Kimbilio Publishing Prize, this story collection elaborates the realities of a diasporic existence, split identities, and the beautiful potency of meaningful connections.

Primarily told from the perspective of women and children in the Northeast who are tethered to fathers and families in Puerto Rico, these stories explore the cultural confusion of being one person in two places. Loudly and joyfully filled with cousins, aunts, grandparents, and budding romances, these stories are saturated in summer nostalgia, and place readers at the center of the table to enjoy family traditions and holidays: the resplendent and universal language of survival for displaced or broken families. Amina Gautier, Ph.D., is the author of three short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and The Loss of All Lost Things. Gautier is the recipient of the Blackwell Prize, the Chicago Public Library Foundations 21st Century award, the International Latino Book Award, the Flannery O'Connor Award, and the Phillis Wheatley Award in Fiction. For her body of work, she has received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

Available products
Book Published 2024-01-16 by Soft Skull Press

Comments

Amina Gautier's THE BEST THAT YOU CAN DO is a Soft Skull Award-winning story collection

Amina Gautier's The Best That You Can Do is easily one of the best short story collections of the year. Surprising, culturally complex, delightfully sly and offering a sancocho of fully realized characters, this book is a knockout.

The Best That You Can Do sparkles with love from head to toe. These bittersweet tales of the diaspora leap across time and space with the smooth kicks and turns of an electric slide. With pointedness and grace, Amina Gautier tackles the complexities of modern romance, dating, ancestry, and loss while retaining so much charm. It's a magical mix-tape of stories I found myself reading again and again.

The present and the past collide in linked tales... Varying in length and focus, Gautier's stories pry open characters' inner motives and the effects of displacements with precision and compassion.

Generous, big-hearted, and always beautiful, wise, moving, funny and honest, these are dagger-stab stories that remind us why we read and write and struggle and love and continue on in the world. Gautier is a connector of great depth, and one comes away from these pages feeling renewed, encouraged and almost saved.

Amina Gautier's The Best That You Can Do adds even more luster to her award-winning artistry. Sharp emotional focus offsets the blur afflicting people who 'wisp into memory' and jump from Puerto Rico to Bed Stuy to Lisbon to Chicago. The threat to Black lives staggers the souls of charactersand of readers. 'Tears on Tap' is a masterpiece, and the touching final stories blend with kaleidoscopic power, where intense love can rupture by the next page. But old lovers also seek one another out for a last gaze before they go blind, and the jewel-like 'Slip' offers a dazzling response to the pain of loss and solitude.

Amina Gautier reveals with unique creativity characters that we empathize with and can learn from, presenting them on the most relevant new cultural stages. Memory by association, etaphor, undermining cultural norms, uncommon themes - readers will love and deeply appreciate these insightful stories.

Amina Gautier's THE BEST THAT YOU CAN DO has appeared on several lists of anticipated books: The Chicago Review of Books includes THE BEST THAT YOU CAN DO on their round-up 12 Must-Read Books of January, and thrills in Gautier's "incredible attention to the interior lives of her characters." Meanwhile, NYLON features the title on January 2024's Must-Read Book Releases, declaring the collection "joyful, nostalgic and intimate," and the title can also be spotted on the O.C. Register's Highly Anticipated Books Coming in 2024.

...powerful and cohesive collection... This packs a stinging punch. Read more...

In this vital new collection, Amina Gautier provides a map through the tensions and the beauty of embracing the past and the present... She reminds us of how some things change and how others just get better with time. Gautier, in her signature style, creates a world through interlinked stories that read like chapters in a page-turner of a novel, each autonomous yet part of a whole... Copiously filled with both the stresses and joys of worlds both familiar and foreign... her characters have to take a closer look at self, the self that keeps unfolding in the wonder of the worlds inhabited. With the lyricism of a poet and the storytelling of a griot, Gautier put her foot in these stories: 'Buen Provecho'!

The protagonists of this powerful and cohesive collection of vignettes from Gautier grapple with the civil rights era's legacy of violence and unfulfilled promise. Gautier's flashes of familial angst and political commentary ignite each entry. This packs a stinging punch.

The Best That You Can Do is another triumph for Amina Gautier. These stories show off the enormous range and versatility we fans have come to expect. In recent years Gautier has been performing ever greater feats of compression and distillation. In her hands, the microfiction or short-short is a jewel box to show off the scintillations of 'ordinary' experience, especially childhood experience. This is the luminous everyday, and Gautier's talent is incandescent.

Amina Gautier is a true master of the short story, and The Best That You Can Do is perhaps her most ambitious collection, one that seeks to prevent all these singular moments from turning into wisps of memory, keeping them alive and crackling. There are stories that navigate time and space in new ways, each story holds the singular brilliance of each moment without losing its connection to the whole.

Alternately as bracing and bright as an ice pop on a summer day, or sharp and fiery as neighborhood firecrackers, this dazzling mosaic of stories span lifetimes, charting how places and people shape us, and how some burdens can be shared, while others are carried alone. Amina Gautier speaks with wisdom and humor about childhood, about the end of life, and about how to survive all the years in between.

Amina Gautier doesn't write stories that merely reveal the lives of her characters - she pulls you across timelines and oceans and seas, right into their raw hearts. And you will love them.