Monday, July 27, 2015

An Interview with Lou Gaglia

An Interview with Lou Gaglia, author of Poor Advice, and other stories.

AFI: First, congratulations on the publication of Poor Advice Second, thank you for participating in this interview.

LG: Thank you very much, Anthony. I feel honored.

AFI: As we get started, I have to ask: how do you feel about Poor Advice now that it's a finished product? This is a short story collection, but in many ways it reads like one single narrative. Did you write the short stories with the overall product in mind? Do you have favorites among these short stories?

Monday, July 13, 2015

Poor Advice, a review


See the links below
Poor Advice is a collection of about two dozen short stories by Lou Gaglia. Poor Advice came to my Kindle in a flash following a short email exchange with the author a few weeks back. I first became acquainted with Lou Gaglia when my magazine Umbrella Factory Magazine ran his short story “Little Leagues” in December of 2011.

It has been my experience in the years I've worked as an editor for a small literary magazine that the writers who succeed are the prolific ones. It's also been my experience that writers who are unafraid of the process of publication are the writers we get to read. In Lou Gaglia case, every short story in his Poor Advice has appeared in a literary magazine first. If there is a lesson to take from this writer and this book, it is this: write good fiction, send it out to magazine editors, get rejected, rewrite this good fiction for a better product and repeat the process. This entire collection warrants respect because it is well written, well arranged and it's downright fun.

I get the impression from many of the short stories that locale or settings are very real. Mr. Gaglia uses the well known places such as Carnegie Hall or Long Island trains as backdrops in his stories. It feels like his New York, and places within it, are oftentimes characters themselves. Those who live in New York, or those who even have a perfunctory familiarization with it will no doubt love this collection.