Dave Madden, Theodore Wheeler, + Amina Gautier

Theodore Wheeler’s Bad Faith

With results both liberating and disastrous, the characters of Bad Faith flee the trappings of contemporary domestic life. A young father visits a college friend in San Salvador rather than face the anticipated difficult birth of his third child. A boy comes to terms with his fractured family and the disabled father responsible for him after his soldier mother is stationed overseas. A biracial man journeys across Nebraska for the funeral of his white mother and strikes up an improbable if dishonest relationship with a centenarian Irish woman. And in the collection’s title story, the running narrative of a pathetic yet oddly compelling ladies man culminates in an unexpected and deadly confrontation. In Theodore Wheeler’s collection of prizewinning stories, the herd can’t always outpace the predator.

“These stories turn the reader’s expectations on their head as Wheeler spins stunning arabesques, scoring the surface of his characters’ reality to reveal the malice, confusion, and ultimate frailty of us all.”

– Jonis Agee, author of The Bones of Paradise

Dave Madden’s If You Need Me I’ll be Over There

This debut collection of short stories tells the tale of a different kind of difference—one not set in the glittering lights of New York or Los Angeles, but in the grand and wide American Midwest. For these characters, queerness is part of the environment, like the soil, the sky, and the supermarket: an HIV-positive chemist uses football to connect with his brothers; a 17-year-old girl tussles with a cartoon cobra to avoid thinking about the mother who abandoned her; and a hotel concierge starts attending Mass even though his partner was molested by a priest. In seeking out the ordinary struggles of extraordinary people trying to figure out their place within families and communities, I explore what it means to be an outsider always looking in.

“Dave Madden has again given us a wonder of a book. These charismatic stories, as funny as they are sad, are attuned to the possibility of disorder beneath every human aspiration.”
—Paul Lisicky , author of The Narrow Door

Amina Gautier’s The Loss of All Things Lost

Amina Gautier’s The Loss of All Lost Thigns won the Elixir Press 2014 Fiction Award. It is a short story collection that illuminates the beauty that can be found in inconsolable loss. Gautier leads us through terrible reality but leaves us with the promise of hope and redemption. Contest judge, Phong Nguyen had this to say about it: “Literary fiction that grips us and won’t let us go is notoriously rare. To offer us complex emotional experience and riveting narrative momentum, and then to leave the reader in contemplation of its sophisticated themes and subtle weave of objective correlatives that is the stuff of literary greatness, of art that demands to be read in conversation with the canon .Gautier’s stories have you by the throat, and they surprise you with their mercy.

“Quiet, subtle, observant–the stories of The Loss of All Lost Things are pictures of sadness that enrich an understanding of separation and despair. One after another they do what short fiction does so well: capture a character, scene or place that together are much bigger than they seem.” —Shelf Awareness