Even as they blur distinctions between fiction and memoir, the daring, challenging stories in What We Lost in the Fire stretch and expand notions of queer lives-and of queer fiction writing. The eclectic geographies of these stories-Hawai'i, Rome, a Texas prison, southwestern Ohio, New York, Florida, and still other, hybrid landscapes-are reflected in the rich, idiomatic voices of Ricketts' characters. San Francisco, in particular, is as much a living presence in many of these stories as it is a setting, and the novella-length title story captures the nearly indescribable zeitgeist of queer life in "the City" during the plague years at the end of the last millennium-and of the weight of memory for the survivors who live on in the present. Throughout these fictions runs a dark, occasionally lacerating humor, a well-honed sense of both existential absurdity and the harrowingly high stakes of everyday love and trouble. Ricketts' characters are messy. They have faults. They're nobody's role models. This memorable, richly varied collection of tales of ennui, bitterness, and violence; of rambunctious satires and carefully-drawn realism; of love stories (and a few hate stories); of studies in working-class revenge and working-class solidarity honors the distance traveled and the scars earned along the way. These are not "feel good" stories; they're "feel human." stories. Queer literary fiction has a new champion.
Ricketts finds territories where other writers only find interstices, and what results is a collection of stories that uncovers powerful meanings in the most mundane spaces and times. - Keith Banner, author of the short-story collections The Smallest People Alive and Next to Nothing; the novel The Life I Lead; and the anthology, This is True Love: Essays and Stories
Sexuality-as a topic that runs along the spine of many of the stories-is elevated deftly to a more sophisticated arena, away from familiar queer territory and toward poignancy. What impressive storytelling! - Rigoberto Gonzalez, recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement and of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and author of What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood; The Book of Ruin; and Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa
