Micro-Review: Amina Gautier's The Loss of All Lost Things

Corey Campbell

Like many good short story collections, Amina Gautier's third collection, The Loss of All Lost Things, traces heartbreak in its many forms. In these stories, her characters struggle to navigate feelings of disconnection brought on by kidnapping, abandonment, death, a series of bad choices, and, often, the inability to make their lives whole again. Gautier, whose previous story collections Now We Will Be Happy and At-Risk won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, respectively, writes with precision and weight. Her stories feel solid, well-crafted, as well as unadorned. She avoids overt stylistic flourishes, and instead focuses on the truth of her characters’ suffering. In doing so, she creates a testament to enduring loss.

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