The Best That You Can Do: Stories. Cet article n’est pas disponible.The Best That You Can Do: Stories

*Winner of the Midwest MLA Book Award*
*Florida Book Awards Silver Medal Winner*
*IPPY Book Award Silver Medalist*
*Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize*
*Longlisted for The Story Prize*
*Finalist for the Big Other Book Awards*
*Honorable Mention for the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Awards*

Winner of the 2023 Soft Skull-Kimbilio Publishing Prize, a collection of short stories that elaborate 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--of having a mother who wants your father and his language to stay on his island but sends you there because you need to know your family. 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.

Refusing to shy away from dysfunction, loss, obligation, or interrogating Black and Latinx heritages "If we flip the channels fast enough, we can turn almost anyone Puerto Rican, blurring black and white into Boricua." Gautier's stories feature New York neighborhoods made of island nations living with seasonal and perpetual displacement. Like Justin Torres' We the Animals, or Quiara Alegria Hudes' My Broken Language, it's the characters-in-becoming--flanked by family and rich with detail--that animate each story with special frequencies, especially for readers grappling split-identities themselves.

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 Foundation's 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.