Partial List of People to Bleach

by Garielle Lutz, Gordon Lish (Foreword)

Even as a chapbook, it was one of Time Out New York's Ten Best Books of 2007, and now Future Tense Books publishes an expanded paperback edition of Partial List of People to Bleach, with six previously uncollected pieces, including the provocative and now-classic essay "The Sentence Is a Lonely Place," and a foreword by Gordon Lish.

"Partial List of People to Bleach is at once cruelly honest, precisely painful, and beautifully rendered." Brian Evenson

"Gary Lutz is a master-living proof that, even in our cliche-ridden, denial-drenched, hype-driven age, true originality is still an American possibility." George Saunders

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, LGBT, American, Essays, Short Story Collection

116 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Garielle Lutz is an American writer of both poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in Sleepingfish, NOON, The Quarterly, Conjunctions, Unsaid, Fence, StoryQuarterly, The Believer, Cimarron Review, 3rd Bed, Slate Magazine, New York Tyrant, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Apocalypse Reader (Thunder's Mouth Press), PP/FF: An Anthology (Starcherone Books), The Random House Treasury of Light Verse and in the film 60 Writers/60 Places.

A collection of her short fiction, Stories in the Worst Way, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in November 1996 and re-published by 3rd Bed in 2002 and Calamari Press in 2009. Lutz's second collection of short stories, I Looked Alive, was published by the now-defunct Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and republished by Black Square Editions/Brooklyn Rail in 2010. Partial List of People to Bleach, a chapbook of both new and rare early stories (published pseudonymously as Lee Stone in Gordon Lish's The Quarterly) was released by Future Tense Books in 2007. Divorcer, a collection of seven stories, was released by Calamari Press in 2011.

In 1996, Lutz was recipient of a literature grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1999, she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

In 2020, Lutz came out as a transgender woman.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

In the spirit of an opening act to warm up the crowd, before I write anything about Gary Lutz, take a look at several mini-chapters from Heartscald, one of eleven short stories included in Partial List of People to Bleach:

ERRAND
The girl behind the counter rang up my package of paper towels and said, "Will that be all?"
"No," I said, "I want to suck out all of your memories."

THE TROUBLE BETWEEN PEOPLE USUALLY GETS ITS STARTED
The pastor kept saying, "Thy will be done," and all I could think was, "Thy what will be done?"

SHE WAS CARDIACALLY ALL OVER THE PLACE
What they told me is that when the doctors opened him up, they found lots of accordion files, jars full of wheat pennies, a glockenspiel, a couple of storm windows, and told him there was nothing they could do.

RECORD PLAYER
I used to play my records with the volume turned all the way down.
I would lower my ear to the needle to hear the tiniest, trebliest versions of the song.

GIRL
She wanted me to believe her best feature was her shadow.

FATHERLAND
The state I was born in had to be abbreviated as "PA."

THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANTED TO SAY BUT SO WHAT?
I wish I could inhabit my life instead of just trespassing on it.
----------------------------

Pretty cool, eh? Gary has it all going here: he's astute, witty, savvy, quirky, playful and possesses an incredible ear for the nuances of language.

Gary recognizes his writing will not appeal to a wide audience since his literary aesthetic will frustrate the expectations of what many people expect in a short story, such things as character development, characters with names, a designated setting, say New York or Pittsburgh or Greensburg (Gary's current city); rather, his writing is language oriented, sentence oriented, writing that will attract a reader who is, as he expresses it, a "page hugger" rather than a "page turner."

Nope, none of that hastily turning pages to find out what happens next when reading Gary; quite the opposite: a reader will be invited to hug the page, to linger, to luxuriate, to relish each well-formed sentence, its stressed syllables, the precise placement of each word, possible instances of assonance and alliteration, the sound the words make together.

For, as Brian Evenson states so eloquently: "The drama of Lutz’s work is in the language—in the sentence as a unit in particular. He crafts each part of his sentence carefully enough that there are subdramas in the relationships of the words themselves, in the productive tensions between them. If you are looking for story and plot, you have come to the wrong place. If your idea of character involves epiphany and obvious change, then look elsewhere. But if you are interested in seeing what language can really do when deftly manipulated to give it great flexibility, in seeing how the subtleties of struggling minds might be expressed, and in learning a new way of reading, welcome."

We encounter one such struggling mind in Loo where the narrator (I picture an older brother sharing Gary's gift for language) describes, in terms both tender and tined, his sister Loo's slow fade into a foglike gray beginning with her ordinariness in childhood: "She was done up in a body bereft of freckles or shine."

Here's another pithy line re Loo's blandness as a young lady: "Her private life was not so much private as simply unwitnessed." And a little further on: "She had the disadvantage of looking like a lot of other people."

Let's pause here and take a closer look at that last Lutz sentence. Notice the alliteration of those three 'l' words in the phrase "looking like a lot." And there's not only the sound but the simple shape (one vertical stroke) of each "l," almost as if the shaft-like line of the unornamented consonant is a stand-in for the plainness of sister Loo, almost as if Gary is writing the prose counterpart of concrete poetry with its preoccupation with the symbolic significance of letters and the patterns letters make on the page. No wonder seasoned translators agree Gary Lutz is the only writer in English who is absolutely untranslatable!

Then, toward the story's conclusion, we read: "There was the ruck and malarkey of a diary for a while. She dressed page after page in a sneaky, tossing backhand." Not only do we have all the many points of language, including the shape and sounds of those words grouped together, but also so much revealed respecting Loo's mindset: the "ruck and malarkey" of a diary, as if Loo could take the edge off her ordinariness, as if she could fool the reader by committing the thoughts and events in her uneventful, unremarkable life to paper in a handwriting dressed up in flourishes.

Loo is about one hundred sentences sectioned off into seventeen separate short episodes covering little more than four pages. The attention given the above four sentences could easily expand out to each one of the hundred - Gary Lutz's language packs that much wallop. Remarkable. Make that remarkable times ten.

Lastly, I'll turn to my favorite mini-chapter in a four pager entitled Six Stories:

CONCENTRATION
The narrator alludes to something wrong with the son - the kid needs special shoes among other special education requirements. But then life gives the kid a break. How does Gary Lutz express this breakthrough? Below we have the entire glorious paragraph. Among my favorite words: encumbering, portable, fenestration, props, tidily, destitute, thick, wicket, cage, fittingly - and my favorite bit: the kid feeling he's in a wicker basket cage but a wicker where he's equipped to better maneuver through his schooldays.

"His one big break was getting told he needed eyeglasses - an encumbering portable fenestration that made props of his nose and ears. It was not so much that the world was now filled in more tidily (things were less destitute of outline, less likely to drown within themselves before they arrived in the thick of his eye) as that he felt he had acquired a wicker about himself, a little cage up front through which business could get quickly and fittingly done."
---------------------------

*Note: All eleven stories in Partial List of People to Bleach are also included in The Complete Gary Luz published by Tyrant Books


American author Gary Lutz, born 1955

[Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

unlike the poetry-prose amalgams of someone like renee gladman, who is arguably equally as painstaking with her sentences, lutz writes a kind of extreme non-poetic prose. while gladman can approach the sentence with habits associated with contemporary poetry--e.g. ashbery-like slippages between clauses, shifting subjectivity, broken signifiers--a lutz sentence is extremely parseable. and unlike a prose-writer like diane williams (whose stories are also made up of, at least grammatically, generally traditional sentences), lutz isn't a master of indeterminacy and suggestiveness... what i think makes lutz unique (and so attractive to imitators) is his taking of sentences' normative grammar and subverting and transcending (but not breaking) its rules. the singular result is a clearly identifiable style that is simultaneously emotionally clamped and devastating.

the size of this chapbook was also for me just the right amount of lutz. he's pretty intense to be with for much longer. but maybe one can evolve to him. i kept wondering what a lutz novel would be like...

or maybe the story collections are what a novel would be like. for in each story, there's just enough plot to ground the language--usually we're dealing with aborted love and/or aging. characterization is also minimal, at least the broad strokes kind. instead we have recordings of instances of personality--too far in close up to make a character--or a kind of everyperson abjectness. so that, maybe the novel would just be this, a carefully sustained and perfectly familiar heartache, rendered in deviously straitjacketed prose that would go impossibly on and on.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bloody hell. This is an education, reading this, haven't finished yet, taking it slowly, sentence by sentence. And having to go back and re-read each. It's like hanging upside down sometimes. There's something heartless and odd here. I do like it though.

It’s just that I tend to get all devotionate when I sense sore spots and unaired ires in any shrewd mess densening suddenly in my ken.
A Tuesday, for undiscouraged instance: a vexable, vapory girl.

The writer is obsessed with arms, pubic hair, snot and detritus of all kinds. She is unkind but maybe accurate to the characters, funny, brisk, unusual:

She unbuttoned, unzipped. I had forgotten, I suppose, the finely hirsute earthliness of her, that vicious uneternal splendency. (The skelter of moles along the small of her back, the salmon-patch birthmark on the nape of her neck, the bubbly something near the groin— that droll, brazen sincerity of her body had always been a sticking point.)

another encounter:

“If it’ll get your mind off it,” my aunt said. She had disposed herself beneath me, her eyes already shut, her hair a leaden bulk, an infrequent twinkle in her fingernails. I filled her body with some pulse of my trouble.

Full of bon mots and aphorisms:

She was a remainder of her parents, not a reminder of them. Her private life was not so much private as simply witnessless.

As you realise and the essay at the end confirms, Lutz's main concern is the sentence. Making each one work exactly, completely. You can tell from this: A sentence that I have spent an almost pathological amount of time gaping at since the turn of the century, a sentence that always leaves me agog, is the opening sentence in Sam Lipsyte’s story “I’m Slavering,” in Venus Drive: “Everybody wanted everything to be gleaming again, or maybe they just wanted their evening back.”

I, too, spent a long time on each of Lutz's sentences, and was rewarded, but sometimes I felt the story was often secondary. So, beguiling stuff. Very different: attention to detail taken to extremes.

[Brent Legault · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has stung me. This book is a scorpian in the shoe, a wasp in the potato salad. It is always that way with Lutz and me. With Lutz's words, I mean. (I've never met him but I'm certain I'd be saddened that his physique wouldn't match the iron tendons and kevlar flesh of his sentences.) I sound as if I'm his kin -- an ovine cousin or a trembling aunt -- what with my gush. But his work works me over. I am swelling. I am overripe. I'll need plenty of bed rest after this.

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lutz occasionally (as in a few of the stories here) makes you uncertain whether you have just read the most banal summation of a life, an inexact eulogy, or if you have simply missed what was being said. This collection is uneven, but its high points ("Pulls," "Tic Douloureux") are very high, and even its lowest points are more interesting than most stories out there. The language is not meant to be deciphered, but to be experienced. Lutz engages in a new kind of linguistic play, one in which even non-performative utterances have become performative in some way. Their convolutions are their "point." What lies behind them, the eely quiverings of uncertain sexuality and mid-life career, is made manifest in the way Lutz expresses them.

[Michael Seidlinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is that part of a sentence right after the verb but long enough before its objective end where people like me reside, whispering each syllable, searching for the exact measure of cadence we're looking for, and it is there that we can hold on, a better place to end the night given what waits for us tomorrow. We know what to expect. After the period at the end of the sentence waits the rest of that dreary paragraph.

Then the paragraph is done; we look down and see that another paragraph beckons us back into the same circle-spiral that threads together any story, any novel believed to be worth coaxing to its completion.

And we can't resist going back in.

[Jonathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought "Lord help me if I ever come to enjoy a book like this.." Or maybe that is the authors intention? Maybe I am a square. I am happy to be a square. This small book (and I do not mean that in the physical sense) is vulgr, a canker, and dreadfully dirtily boring.

[Lars Meijer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Garielle Lutz kwam op mijn radar door een prachtig artikel in The Nation, waarna ik gelijk iets van haar wilde lezen. Het proza van Lutz is hoekig, aforistisch, muzikaal en taai; in een ander stuk wordt omschreven dat het lijkt alsof haar personages (of taal) constant bezig is met verdwijnen, dat ervoer ik ook. Deze uitgave heeft het waanzinnige essay The Sentence is a Lonely Place, en alleen daarvoor is het al de moeite waard om deze verzameling te kopen.

[Sentimental Surrealist · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hadn't touched Lutz in a long time, so I'd forgotten the sheer weirdness of the experience. I get a blend of feelings by him, my satisfaction tempered by frustration or maybe vice versa. The man is, above all, a conductor of the sentence, responsible for some of the best prose I've ever read. Open to a random page of his books and you'll unearth gems like "I had to shove a brood of good soaps aside" from "Kansas City, Missoula" or "My sisters had turned out to be women who wore their hair speculatively, lavishing it forward into swells, or loading it again with clips, barrettes" and "it was hazing July, and the days just burned away" from "Years of Age," sentences where the sounds dance in strange and beautiful ways. In a sense, that's all your average Lutz story is, the motion of sound across a series of sentences. As someone who joneses for good prose, I read this book awash in words.

Where Lutz frustrates me a little is his approach to plot and character, which is as oblique as his prose is precise. His stories circle around mindsets, feature characters who are fundamentally the same, disregard the passage of time ("Years of Age" mentions seasons, but in a way that makes it hard to tell if he's being literal or metaphorical), and ignore the physical world almost completely, barring the occasional clutch detail ("I Was in Kilter with Him, A Little" describes women "dressed for functioning public loneliness in tarplike weighted cottons"). Nor do you get much of an arc; the events simply hang. I find their stasis is more than made up for by the motion of Lutz's language, but I like fiction where things happen, and there's sure not a lot going on in Lutz. Which seems to be by design, but it still frustrates me a little.

Still, I enjoyed this book. "Years of Age" remains one of the best-written short stories I've ever read at a sentence level, and the two fragmented pieces ("Heartscald," "Six Stories") make narrative momentum out of Barthelmesque bizarro contrasts and absurdist humor. So yes, the Lutz experience is well worth having; he's someone I plan to revisit enthusiastically and try to work into my own writing. Besides, even the more frustrating aspects of reading this book were the sort of frustrations only Lutz could deliver. And there's something to be said for that, dammit. A good book from a writer who is quite insistently himself.

[Janaka · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read Lutz a number of years ago when a fiction-writing friend of mine shoved it into my hands and said, "Read this. It's prose for poets." Years later I remember being totally transfixed by that book (I LOOKED ALIVE), and reading PARTIAL LIST OF PEOPLE TO BLEACH I have no idea why it's taken me so long to return to him. But I think we find the books we're ready for, and maybe I was just finally ready for this book.

I say this book is amazing with the caveat that I read prose for the sentences--that is, I read prose looking for the poetry in it. This collection of short stories is pretty experimental when it comes to narrative, though not at all inaccessible. Just know that Lutz gets in an out of each story like he's shanking someone in a prison yard; he walks up to you stabs you fifty times in fifteen seconds and then walks away while you're bleeding out before you even fall to your knees.

I'll finish by saying that this edition has an essay in the back by Lutz, titled "The Sentence Is a Lonely Place." If I still taught writing, I would make this essay required reading for all my students regardless of genre. If you love literature then that essay alone is worth the price of admission.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

So excited to be reissuing this collection with five new stories and the classic essay, The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. We just got our first copies and it's stunningly beautiful. More proof that Lutz is unlike any other writer and that his empathy for the dark emotional side of his characters is a wonder to behold.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶]

Second attempt with Lutz, and I guess he just isn't for me. I acknowledge his strengths and 'originality' but it's not enough to keep me interested. I feel nothing when I read his stories and I need to feel something to make reading worthwhile.

[in8 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Partial List of People to Bleach sunk it's teeth in and wouldn't let me do anything else. It wouldn't let me sit either, so I had to lay down on the couch. Eventually I ended up puddled on the floor, as I was overcome with vertigo, which I've never experienced before, especially whilst laying down, except maybe when reading Lutz' earlier books. I've always wondered where such euphemisms like "floored by," come from. Now I know.

These stories in particular deal prominently with beings that are out of whack, uneven, off kilter. Emotions have substantival qualities that ooze and puddle, reforming, reshaping. But it's the sentences that have their way with you, punching you in the gut, keeling you over and over, and hitting you again while you're down. As an aspiring writer, you are left with the feeling that you may as well throw in the towel and bow down as no one can ever match the relentless stream of epiphanic sentences that Lutz can deliver. As a reader, I was rendered into a naked ball of putty, overwhelmed by the every day things like gravity and incapable of speaking for days. And I had to make a cover that was worthy?

Having never taken an English or grammar class, I can't say what makes his writing so effective. Having an academic background in physics, I tend to deconstruct things into their indivisible components, to think in terms of action and reaction. Words are the atomic particles of language, which is what we use to try to render our personal realities. Sentences are the devised interactions between these indivisible words that collide with each other to synthesize ever-complex and at times non-linear, unpredictable relationships.

The characters that Lutz creates with these atomic words also act on this quantum level, in self-similar fashion. Without other characters, they have no identities, no one to witness or interact with, or to validate themselves. They plod along in non-descript suburban universes, colliding, interacting, repelling or attracting. "Looking for action," as they say. You could say the characters are sexually charged, but not in ways we'd normally think of sexuality. Gender is irrelevant to Lutz. Men collide with men, men collide with women, women collide with women. Everyone is reaching out in desperation trying to connect, form a bond, to have an interaction, to create something bigger than their minute ionic selves. In this way, Lutz' sentences and characters, and consequential "stories" are like those snaking lines in bubble chambers that plumb the guts of our beings to reveal revelatory truths.

[Mirror · Rating 1 out of 5]

There are a couple of nice sentences in here but they don't mesh and everything else is uninteresting. Just read an autistic person's diary, or something - the wordplay will be much better.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorite titles. Have read this collection multiple times and calling them fictions rather stories is certainly appropriate. Just calling them "writings"would be even better. These are not stories in any sense of the word. Meanderings, actually, or mutterings, or even thought bubbles would be a better description. Lutz is a disciple (and yes we do need to use that word for these acolytes) of Gordon Lish. So the distorted sentences are under par for this linksland. Also need to invoke Roland Barthes and his The Pleasure of the Text, because that is really what we are up against here as readers. Set aside any expectation of story and meaning. If that is what you are looking for then what we have here is a failure to communicate. Instead, take pleasure in the sometimes weird assortment of words. Most of the more arresting sentences border on non-sequiturs, where the second part of the sentence contradicts or at minimum devalues the first part of the sentence. This is by design. Language as art as opposed to language as (aiming for) meaning. Rating appropriately: language? 5+ Story? 1 is charitable. Pleasure? 4 because the language is fun anyway you put it under the microscope.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lutz uses the most peculiar vocabulary, he is like an inventor of language. By the third or fourth page I was like, "Shit, I'm gonna need a dictionary". What an interesting array of stories using virtually no gender or age which is sort of hard to pull off, but he does it, making you say things aloud to yourself about dictionaries and whether or not you actually understand. You can't devour his words whole, you have to chew and swallow them slowly, letting every meaning soak in your bloodstream and digest in your body. This is very impressive work and hard to read at times- but worth it!

[Udai · Rating 1 out of 5]

It took me forever to finish this book. It had so many great sentences that you could hang on the wall, but somehow it felt like the writer was only interested in making these intricate sentences and didn't bother putting the story line in mined. I really got bored and lost interest in the middle of every single story. Still -somehow - a very well written book that any literature geek will enjoy.

[Colin Moon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honest to God, this guy is making the rest of us look like tools; this is one of the most incredible things I've ever read, and I'm sad I can't write anything like him. The best six bucks I've ever spent, and I need to read everything he's ever written; the lyrical nature of his prose, the acrobatic turns of phrase, the strange honesty.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anybody who considers him/herself a writer, stand back and gasp at Lutz's sentences. They are nimble and unpredictable and contain an immense amount of emotion. He's one of the best...

[Samuel Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Inevitable'

[luciana · Rating 2 out of 5]

i think these ideas were kinda half baked but i loved the last story about syntax and wording

[Bella Moses · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lutz is my queen of the English language, what much more can be said?

Within and beyond the sheer glory of the language, I’m so interested in this book as an exploration of sibling-hood (siblingness?). Yes this is a gory, somewhat heartless depiction of what it means to be tied to someone in the way, but it rings very true to me nonetheless. Much more can and probably has been said on that by someone much smarter than me so I’ll leave it here. Also obsessed with Lutz as a sex writer! I’m so so hungry for more!


PS: this book is SO bisexual…like maybe the most bisexual book I’ve ever read.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gary Lutz, Partial List of People to Bleach (Future Tense, 2007)

I picked up Lutz's chap Partial List of People to Bleach at, seemingly, exactly the right time; Stories in the Worst Way, his first collection (from all the way back in 1996), just got itself a paperback release from Calamari Press and has been getting mentions in every rag around the globe, it seems. People are rediscovering Gary Lutz, and paging through this slim volume, it's obvious why.

“Another night of roundabout apologizing, and she reached for a shoulder bag, not one of her regular daytime totles. She tipped it all out, fingered everything preservingly where it fell.
The whole business was already looking a little too votive to me.
First the smoot, the flaked razures and other collects, she had abstracted from the gutter between blades of an overemployed disposable shaver. (It had taken, she said, the edge of in index card to reclaim it.)
Then, in a mouth-rinse bottle, a few fluidal ounces of sea-blue slosh from a compress that had been used whenever there were immaculate agonies behind a knee.
And a smutched inch or so of adhesive tape from a homemade bandage, into which pores had confided their oily fluences.”
(“I Was in Kilter with Him a Little”)

It's like Lydia Davis and Tao Lin had some sort of twisted, deformed offspring, except that Lutz is more talented than either of them. My only problem with it is that there's not more of this; I'll be picking up his other collections posthaste. This is well worth checking out, and for the price, how can you go wrong? *** ½

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am super proud to be the publisher of this little gem. You can open it anywhere and read any sentence and be floored. I think it's even better than his 2nd book, I Looked Alive (which is also really great--though much more dense somehow).

[Christy Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Am I the only one who thought this was subpar?

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as good as his earlier outing but the edition I had has a wonderful essay on constructing percussive sentences which earned it the fourth star.

[H Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of amazing, but also kind of too much of a good thing. I loved it, but it exhausted me. Might be a while before I delve into his other stuff.

[Harry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been on a Steve Aylett binge recently, having stumbled across his wildly creative work earlier this year. I have devoured most of his back catalogue and find myself hungry for more in the same vein, so I've been scouring the internet for recommendations. Lutz's name popped up several times so I grabbed this and dived in.

Aylett and Lutz both write unusually dense, experimental prose where each sentence is intended as an aphoristic, epigrammatic morsel to be savoured and chewed over rather than wolfed down. Here's Lutz's self-assessment, straight from the horse's mouth in this collection's closing essay:

"...as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language — the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself."

I'd say that Lutz broadly succeeds in this aim, though not consistently. With his focus heavily on sentencecraft, Lutz loses something essential. For me, his writing lacks soul and human warmth - perhaps deliberately excludes it through its lack of conventional character and plot development. As Partial List of People to Bleach's cover tells us, these are 'fictions' rather than short stories. There's very little in the way of story, with each fiction reading more like a rambling recollection voyeuristically overheard in some surreal bar. Most start right into the middle of a monologue about an unnamed spouse and/or sibling: 'Shall we face something else? I had a sister once.' (Loo); 'Worse, I had been the husband, most recently, of a sweetly unpoised, impersonal woman...' (You're Welcome); etc. Lutz's characters are bereft of detail, faceless mannequins for his intricately crafted sentences to dangle off.

The final item in this collection - an essay entitled 'The Sentence Is A Lonely Place' - reads a bit like a magician explaining his tricks to the audience after his act is concluded. The scholar in me appreciated the window into his technical process, but I also felt like his exacting breakdown killed the vibe somewhat. He exposits at length on the origins and methods of his writing style, demonstrating some of the techniques he uses and also analysing choice sentences from the works of contemporaries such as Don Delillo. I suppose it has certainly supplied some interesting analytical tools for me to apply whilst reading other experimental works, and once I was done I immediately noticed the kind of patterns he'd described in the title of this book (the sonic interplay between the shifting plosive Ps and slurring Ls).

Lutz is undeniably clever and there's much to admire in the boundary-pushing attention to detail in his writing, but ultimately I didn't have much fun reading him, whilst Aylett had me laughing out loud and gasping at his audacity on nearly every page. Aylett's writing is far tighter, his genius more consistent, whilst also being genuinely funny, action-packed and full of astounding twists.

[Peter G · Rating 5 out of 5]

I might have read this the first time in the wrong time, the wrong place. Reading it when it came out, I hated it. Reading it fifteen years later has given me a complete new appreciation of Garielle Lutz’s writing and craft. My edition of this book has Lutz’s manifesto The Sentence is a Lonely Place as the last entry and in some ways it's a pity it’s last. This piece outlines Lutz’s poetics, including her extreme focus on writing at the level of the sentence. It serves to cast retrospective sense over the odd choices of the stories in the collection before it. Lutz’s writing is so focused at that micro-level that they can seem like they feel to cohere in any sort of conventional way. You really have to work to uncover plot, character, incident, and anything else the language of a story is typically tied to. They’re often about relationships in all their mundane detail, about aging, about daily life. They feel like confessions or a diary or a recluse’s notes written to themself. This can be alienating and challenging; for me it can make the narratives themselves hard to prise out.

For all that focus on language itself though, Lutz is not an airy-fairy poetic stylist. As you’d expect from someone who had a long running career as a university instructor in basic composition and someone who has taken a hand in writing two books on grammatical usage, she’s got a firm grasp of mechanics. Instead, it's like she takes joy in somehow tweaking convention just enough to uncover new semantic depths. The language is mannered, of course, but, if anything, a kind of working class sentiment and straightforwardness lurks beneath. I know I’m not exactly being clear: but it's a hard thing to explain. It’s just not like many short-story collections that you’ll read in your life, but one that is very worth reading. I know that I’ve already flipped the book back to its beginning to read over again.

[Valentina Salvatierra · Rating 4 out of 5]

A unique book. I recommend diving into the stories BEFORE reading the essay so that you don't get to them with a certain pre-conception of Lutz's style, although this review and others might give you some hints as to what it's like.

Really enjoyed every second of reading this, yet the specific plots and characters and whatnot all faded quickly, blurring into one voice, one character. One begins to suspect, especially after reading "The Sentence is a Lonely Place" (an essay included at the end), that this lone voice is Gary Lutz himself. So much loneliness contained in these unnerving, quotidian yet bizarre, stories, can be overwhelming. Yet it was a great reading experience and one, I think, that one could easily return to time and time again just to revel in the rhythm, the vocabulary, the grammar of these short stories.

If I do return to it, might add more story by story detail for this review.