Poor Advice and Other Stories

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; and a man is jealous of his brother-in-law’s ventriloquist dummy. Find these stories and many others in Mr. Gaglia’s debut book.


Winner of the 2015 New Apple Literary Award for short story fiction.

Winner of the 2016 New York Book Festival (Fiction)

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, 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

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

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 who 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

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, SUNY at Brockport.

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 is 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

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


The characters of Poor Advice may fumble, but the collection itself triumphs as it deftly slides from the gritty to the surreal, as it holds a mirror to the complex and clumsy machinations of the heart.

Catherine Carberry, Necessary Fiction

Lou Gaglia’s short stories have appeared in Menda City Review, Serving House Journal, Eclectica, Thrice Fiction Magazine, The Oklahoma Review, and elsewhere. His debut story collection Poor Advice won the New Apple Literary Award for short story fiction and the 2016 New York Book Festival Award for fiction. He teaches in upstate New York and is a long-time T’ai Chi Ch’uan practitioner. Visit him at lougaglia.com