Stories in the Worst Way

By Gary Lutz and Garielle Lutz

Book Overview

Gary Lutz is a sentence writer from another planet, deploying language with unmatched invention. He is not just an original literary artist, but maybe the only one to so strenuously reject the training wheels limiting American narrative practice. What results are stories nearly too good to read: crushingly sad, odd, and awe-inspiring.

-Ben Marcus

Gary Lutz is, simply, one of my favorite writers. I wish I could see through skin the way he can. He tells hard truths in thrilling ways; his startling sentences are often darkly funny, and always exactly right.

-Amy Hempel

Gary Lutz is one of the rarest and purest of our treasured literary artists. His authentic language conquers any habit of speech. Let the reader prepare for the first known examples of the most crucial and intimate matters of the heart and mind.

-Diane Williams

What can I say? This is the book. These are the stories, the sentences. Get ready for awe, for envy, for love. Gary Lutz is as funny and original a writer as we have in the language. Consider this, as Lutz would say, a "household fact."

-Sam Lipsyte, author of The Subject Steve

And to those already familiar, may this modest marker of a major milestone renew that thrill and awe you felt on first encounter. Stories in the Worst Way is as richly estranging and rewarding as it was 20 years ago, and if we are better equipped to appreciate it now than we were back then, I suspect it is because Lutz has taught us, with patient faith and unswerving conviction, how to read him. He has made his ferocious fluencies our own.

-Justin Taylor, in Electric Literature

Mordant debut collection of terse stories (some only a few paragraphs long), featuring a playful use of language in the service of a grim vision of contemporary life. Lutz's protagonists are, typically, obsessive catalogers of life's minutiae, going through the motions at vaguely delineated jobs, baffled by life, between relationships and wondering, as one puts it, "at what point people become environments for one another to enter.'

-Kirkus Reviews

The Lutz narrator sticks its slippery-gendered fingers into the sorest spots on its psyche. Stories in the Worst Way is lugubrious mischief, archaeology into inconsolable though jauntily endurable melancholy.

-Village Voice

Lutz is the new sad man of contemporary fiction. His first collection turns the official notion of gender inside out, supplying a new kind of creature-call it a Lutz-which is neither man nor woman.

-Interview magazine

The book has already become a true cult item, and no wonder: It comes charged with humor, humiliation, odd sexual currents, koanlike thought patterns and an artfully gnarled syntax.

- Time Out New York

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1940853575
• ISBN13: 9781940853574
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Calamari Press
• Length: 166 Pages
• Weight: 0.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Smart Prose

Fragments of an unfulfilled life. Lutz is an urban Carver with a sophisticated grasp on grammar. Sparse and exact, this is smart language. Every sentence is a feat, an accomplishment in perspective. To read this book fast is to miss the point. Sit with the incredible delicacy of Gary's prose and you begin to understand why Gordon Lish felt publishing "Stories in the Worst Way" was more important than keeping his own job.

All Hail Gary Lutz!

Gary Lutz is to postmodernism what Henry Miller was to modernism, it's as simple as that. Here we have a writer who deserves to be cannonized, by his unique aplomb, cutting-edge wit, incomparable story-craft, and sensitivity to social issues pervading our culture of commodity and appearances...and yet he's outright ignored by the "Establishment." There is no hope for those glib, irony-insensitive, self-righteous critics who think of his work as overbaked and pretentious...he's obviously trying to use his style to make a valid point or two. Go back to the classroom and stop trying to impress us all with your fashionably hateful and derived commentary.

Inspissance

This word--I know what it means even though I'm sure it's made-up. That's the kind of edge that Gary Lutz dances on and gleefully. He will surprise a reader with a turn of phrase or a turn of plot or character that elicits a gasp and sometimes also a guffaw. I particularly loved "The Daughter," the last story in the book, where the narrator creates an index about his daughter. "Inconsolably okay, 00" This book is inconsolably underread.

Cultural Dysphoria As A Lovely Verb

Lutz is a master wordsmith. He is Pablo Neruda chained to a wall, injected with heroin and winched in hard between American culture and a hard place. He is Sherwood Anderson nauseated by time travel. He is Thomas Pyncheon finally equipped with the brevity in the soul of wit. He is Kurt Vonnegut leaking sad little pools of schadenfreude. The sad reverberations of his comedy and the comic undertones of his tragedy are so subtly realized that his grace may escape you if let it. Don't let it . The ghosts of our discontent orbit through his stories with dismal whimsy. It's the best collection of short stories of the last half century. Lutz can do in three paragraphs what it takes others a novel to accomplish. Extraordinary writer, haunting book.

A startling and original voice

Where the hell did this guy come from? How come there's no picture of him on the book? Why isn't he world famous?! This amazing collection is like nothing I've ever read. Bits of smug language mixed with chunks of black humour and inventive story construction will make your head spin!