Publishers Weekly
★ 09/18/2023
The protagonists of this powerful and cohesive collection of vignettes from Gautier (The Loss of All Lost Things) grapple with the civil rights era’s legacy of violence and unfulfilled promise. The 14-year-old narrator of “Quarter Rican” misses her home in Brooklyn during a visit to Puerto Rico, where her uncle insults her mixed ancestry. “Making a Way,” set in 1968, looks mournfully at the deaths of prominent civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. The next generation is portrayed starkly in “Thankful Chinese,” which describes how a family regularly chows down on takeout while watching The Cosby Show, which presents a healthier and more ordered life than the one they’re resigned to (“We slip the fortunes from their cookies, then toss them without reading; we already know our future”). “Breathe,” set in an unspecified time, blends imagery from 1960s civil rights crackdowns with allusions to modern-day police killings of Black people, successfully collapsing past and present. In it, a woman attends an academic conference and participates in a “die-in” between panels to protest police killings of Black people, reflecting on her relative safety compared to protesters who march on the street. Often, the characters’ emotions feel like the sharp tips of an iceberg, but in “Howl,” about a woman who calls her mother after a breakup and wails despondently in a “Wolf” language, those feelings come messily to the surface. Gautier’s flashes of familial angst and political commentary ignite each entry. This packs a stinging punch. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
Ms., A Must-Read Book
Nylon, A Best Book of the Month
The Orange County Register, A 2024 Highly Anticipated Book
Chicago Review of Books, A Most Anticipated Title
"There is a new lyricism in the writing here, and each fiction feels intensely personal, inviting the reader to linger over lines and images. The rest is that we are regularly taken by surprise not only by the circumstances of the plot, but also by the incandescence of the prose. The Best That You Can Do is one of our most important writers working at the height of her powers." —Jeffrey Condran, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Joyful, nostalgic, and intimate.” —Sophia June, Nylon
"Gautier's prizewinning short-story collection reflects the acrobatic range of a writer who has made the form her own, seamlessly integrating social commentary into her storytelling." —Marion Wink, Oprah Daily
"In her kaleidoscopic collection, Gautier gathers very brief stories—some just two pages, regarded perhaps as 'micro' or 'flash' fiction—that showcase her protean talents . . . Through the prism of Puerto Rican and Black kids and their mothers, Gautier captures their struggles against dislocation, discrimination, violence and the quotidian parts of life with her distinctive wit, style and wisdom." —Elizabeth Taylor, The National Book Review
“Winner of the 2023 Soft Skull-Kimbilio Publishing Prize Amina Gautier brings an incredible attention to the interior lives of her characters; her work is consistently filled with moments of nostalgia and discontent, as she refuses to shy away from the problems of individual and collective displacement.” —Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books
"The stories in Amina Gautier’s The Best That You Can Do, her fourth collection, pour forth in a headlong rush, with a rhythm as propulsive and natural as breathing . . . Fifty-eight very short stories, many just a page or two, operate in a kind of sketch realism. Taken together, Gautier’s gestural, suggestive, and symbolic impulses create a literary diaspora, as if the stories were a population, flung across pages, sharing origins, memories, and themes. "—Kirstin Allio, Necessary Fiction
"Dr. Amina Gautier’s short story collection, The Best That You Can Do, refuses to be fixed in place, dancing across shores and between decades as a luminous chorus of speakers breaks into singular voices that carry readers from New England to Puerto Rico, Chicago and beyond, searching for answers to questions of race, identity, and belonging . . . The stories are compact and muscular, arranged like music, and brimming with voices that shift and quake on the page." — Stephen Patrick Bell, Electric Literature
"Impressive . . . Racism, family squabbles, the dating scene, the immigrant experience: life offers plenty of obstacles that the protagonists in this memorable assortment navigate with dignity." —Michael Magras, Shelf Awareness
"Powerful . . . Gautier’s flashes of familial angst and political commentary ignite each entry. This packs a stinging punch." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Gautier’s stories pry open characters’ inner motives and the effects of displacements with precision and compassion." —Leah Strauss, Booklist
"Gautier has a real gift for finding dignity and bravery in the lives of ordinary women." —Kirkus Reviews
"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." —Michael Griffith, author of Bibliophilia and Trophy
“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 characters—and 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." —Katherine Vaz, author of Above the Salt, Mariana, Fado & Other Stories and Our Lady of the Artichokes
Kirkus Reviews
2023-10-07
Cultural loss, romantic disappointment, sexism, sexual violence, and the cost of racism are examined in close to five dozen stories told through the eyes of Black and Puerto Rican characters.
The biracial children in the stories in the first section, "Quarter Rican," are all pursuing their Puerto Rican heritage: by sneaking behind their mother’s back to learn Spanish, searching for Puerto Rican faces on TV reruns, or scouring the neighborhood for old men who might be their grandfathers. What they don’t know is how much their Black grandmother struggled after her Puerto Rican husband abandoned her, returning to the island and starting a new family. Told from a constellation of points of view, these stories, many of which are no longer than five or six pages, accumulate emotional force and capture the complexity of families and generational divides. Gautier is a master of the short-short story (often referred to as sudden fiction). Pieces like “My Mother Wins an Oxygen Tank at the Casino, or, My Mother Makes an Exception” and “Forgive Me” evoke the fierce love of daughters for their mothers in just two pages, and “Summer Says” swiftly captures summer’s pleasures in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn: “All summer we have the days to ourselves, the neighborhood to ourselves, and the streets are ours for the taking,” the children announce. “Each morning we are few, but by afternoon we are legion.” Sometimes, brevity does a disservice to Gautier’s subject matter, especially when she’s writing about women’s disillusionment with men. In “So Good To See You,” for example, a woman goes on a quasi-date with an old high school friend who spills gravy on his tie and thinks he’s a “good catch” just by virtue of not being in jail. This and a handful of other stories strike a single note and move on. Still, Gautier has a real gift for finding dignity and bravery in the lives of ordinary women. The collection’s final stories focus on Mrs. McAllister, an aging woman whose commitment to her family, especially her dead sister, may move you to tears.
A collection with so many important stories that some of the less successful ones could have been left out.
