Poor Advice and Other Stories
Lou Gaglia
Author Bio
Lou Gaglia is the author of Poor Advice (Spring to Mountain Press, 2015). His stories have appeared recently in The Writing Disorder, Per Contra, Eclectica, Pithead Chapel, Referential Magazine, Rappahannock Review, Blue Monday Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in upstate New York after many years as a teacher in New York City and is a long-time T’ai Chi Ch’uan practitioner who still feels like a beginner.
Description
An awful poet, dumped by his girlfriend, roams through Italy, where he clearly doesn’t belong; an oil delivery man falls in love with a clumsy woman and becomes even clumsier than she is; and a six year old and his father kill over two hundred flies at a horse farm while the father wonders about life and death. Poor Advice and Other Stories, with its mix of the serious and the absurd, reveals Lou Gaglia’s humor, imagination, and range. A man avoids paying a World Series bet to a dying old woman; a vindictive whale chases after movie stars; a man is jealous of his brother-in-law’s ventriloquist dummy; a mustache is terrified of being shaved; and a woman is obsessed with pumping gas at one particular pump in one particular gas station. Find these stories and many others in Mr. Gaglia’s debut book.
Shake yourself free from the restraints of the ordinary—enter the clever and oh-so-quirky mind of Lou Gaglia and his oddly-so, strangely-so, poignant cast of characters.
─ KATHRYN MAGENDIE, author of SWEETIE
Lou Gaglia has a knack for taking mundane, everyday tasks—like pumping gas, selling pools, and getting your car repaired—and turning them into the funniest and most damn profound stories you’ve ever read. Don’t let the title fool you. Gaglia’s stories are full of good advice. Just don’t take any of them too seriously or you may find your life in shambles.
─ NATHANIEL TOWER, author of Nagging Wives, Foolish Husbands
The downtrodden characters that populate Poor Advice chisel away at their blue-collar circumstances and by stories end, without your consent, there’s a fissure splintering your heart. Lou Gaglia’s a spellbinding writer who gathers material from the underbelly gutter-stuff and conjures up a bit of hope for the hopeless, a place to call home from the homeless, and a fighter’s chance at love for the lonely strangers who are, after all, a lot like us.
― JASON OCKERT, author of Wasp Box
In Poor Advice and Other Stories, Lou Gaglia puts the entertainment back in literary fiction. Many of his characters seem laughable and misguided in their fumbling ways, especially with regard to their attempts at approaching the opposite sex, but the reader will come to love them for their heart-warming innocence. You will laugh, you will cry, but mostly you will go away remembering his vivid characters, his spot on dialogue, and his varying modes of conveying the stories in this unique collection, all of which reflect the talents of an outstanding fiction writer.
―MITCHELL WALDMAN, author of Petty Offenses & Crimes of the Heart
His readers will find in Lou Gaglia’s Poor Advice a new voice in contemporary short fiction, a voice made memorable by its sensitivity to language as it is spoken today, yet expressing the old verities of the human heart.
― EARL INGERSOLL, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English, State University of New York at Brockport
What I like best about the people and places that populate Lou Gaglia’s Poor Advice is that they’re all familiar to me. But this is no mean familiarity. Anything but, in fact. These are the people that you meet in your dreams and the places you’ve visited only in your imagination: people whose correspondence fail to see the big picture, obsess over one random-seeming detail of their daily routine, are occasionally an orca. It’s nice to get to know them better.
―MATT ROWAN, author of Big Venerable
Book excerpt
From “Hands” (2013 Million Writers Award runner-up)
It was late at night and crowded, so the only place to sit was on a stool at the counter, and some young woman served me. All I wanted was coffee, and I sat with my chin in my hand watching her set the cup down, then pour the coffee (expertly, without spilling any, I might add). I watched her hands slowly pour, and I frowned deeply, I must say, because they made me think of your hands. They were the opposite, you see. Her hands were beautiful, long and slender and smooth, but like pictures of perfect hands a person can see just anywhere. But your hands are slightly rounder and smaller, and they move almost nervously when you work. I remembered how you were wringing them after that crazy man left.
Sometimes, with just a series of glances, really, when I’m waiting on line, I’ve watched your hands when they were punching numbers, or just resting quietly at your sides, and I’ve thought to myself, Well, those are her hands and no one else’s hands, and that’s why they’re so beautiful. I’d recognize your hands anywhere, I’m willing to bet, even in a foreign country, years from now.
So, sitting at the counter, drinking coffee, just for the first few sips, really, I thought of your hands, because they (and you too) seemed like some great treasure that I wanted to protect, somehow. And so I was frowning (with longing, so to speak).
Now—I feel greatly disappointed to say—I couldn’t possibly send this letter to you, because of the mention of your hands, which is a highly personal topic, I’m sure you’d agree. If you were to read this, you may even wish to slap my face with the very hands I just told you were beautiful. So I can’t send this. Anyway, I’m willing to wager that your own manager, the guy with the mustache and beard, would probably not even pass this letter along to you, but would open it and read it himself instead, and then he and all the cashiers and the meat people would have a good laugh over it and know who I am, and I’d be the joke of the supermarket—much to my chagrin.
Bad enough that I mentioned Marionettes and Donkeys, and then made that awful joke about the indecent Dunkin’ Donuts workers, but then I foolishly told you that the very man who yelled at you went after someone with a knife! Then of course musing about your hands was the worst of all. I’m ready to toss this letter right out the window, but then again someone might read it—or worse, mail it to you.
But I’ll finish this anyway, writing the rest of it as if to you, in a manner of speaking, and streak through it and probably say more stupid things, like maybe insult your grandmother or something, which wouldn’t be hard. To do, I mean…For me to do…
Anyway, tonight I went out again, this time to a Laurel and Hardy festival on Irving Place, not far from that Dunkin’ Donuts which used to be the setting of our possible friendly meeting but now is just another overpriced donut shop.
Author Website
https://lougagtcc.wordpress.com/