Stories in Worst Way

by Garielle Lutz

Not bad stories, whatever the title. Rather, Gary Lutz's debut collection shimmers with a spare, elegant prose and a witty sensibility rare for such a young writer. Each story flashes by so quickly it's difficult to get your bearings before its gone and the next is thrust upon you. Even the sentences barely pause for "I was a flask shaped man in a velour shirt sitting at long lunchroom tables in business schools, cosmetology schools, junior colleges, community colleges."

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, Contemporary, American, Queer, Short Story Collection

Hardcover

First published October 29, 1996

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stories in the Worst Way are chronicles of no events written in no language but in some bureaucratic formulas of a petty clerk.

To get into men’s room, you went through a door and immediately – no more than two feet in – discovered a second door, heavier, unpainted; and before you could get the thing open, you had to make room by reopening, by a good half-foot, the one you had already pushed through.

I wonder what this revelation may add to one’s knowledge of the world. But it seems a lot of people are glad to learn even as much… The monotony and sameness of the stories eventually make them uniformly dull.

It was the second wife who drank. It was always up to me to cart her back and forth to work. The job titles she had during the time I was married to her could be listed either alphabetically or chronologically; I am not sure what difference, if any, such list would make.

Some people live no life – they just move mechanically from one unhappy day to another.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lutz’s insanely well-wrought sentences are individually tantalising. These stories (the separate titles seem irrelevant—this whole collection could be woven together as one abstract novel) frustrate and exhilarate as Lutz surrenders to the musicality of the prose, leaving the reader to dive for the pearls of meaning and emotion that occasionally nestle inside, or conversely to bob along in pleasant waters of the eloquent nonsensical.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these stories are really good, and some there is just no point of reference to grab a hold of the story by. There is something very alienating about even the most welcoming stories here, a lot of times you have no idea of even the gender of the first person narrator, and you feel like you're reading something quite dirty, but it's impossible to really put your finger on what the dirtiness is.
And then there is the language. Lutz likes to use the big antiquated words that you have to look up in the OED, only to find out that the word doesn't make any sense in the context it's being used, but then you realize that a lot of the words he uses don't really make a whole lot of sense sometimes, but they look nice and they give the sentences a nice ring.
I enjoyed it, but the distance he seemed to put between himself and the reader kept me from finding the stories as awesome as they could have been.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

After this collection I'm still undecided about Lutz, but I also have another of his at home that perhaps will edge me one way or the other. At their best these pieces are pleasantly absurd, occasionally poignant, brief tales and vignettes with wacked-out syntax and muscular vocabulary. At their worst they are grey blocks of opaque prose that blurred my eyes. Many drop off suddenly with unfunny non sequiturs or pseudo-aphoristic declarations. Thankfully there were a few spots of humor here and there that I reached out for and clung to like floating driftwood in a horizonless sea. I suppose the problem with collections like this is that the few stories I respond to are quickly drowned out by the ones that leave me cold. I had a similar reaction when I read Ben Marcus, another of Gordon Lish's students. Not to lump all his students together, but Lish has been known for cultivating a certain short fiction aesthetic, and it's one that's been hit or miss for me over the years. Oh well, I will read the other Lutz collection and see how that goes...

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I read this year. I interviewed the author here: https://thecollidescope.com/2022/12/0...

[Kyle Fulford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Incredible writing on a purely aesthetic and atmospheric level. Lutz crafts each sentence with a razor-sharp exactitude; each one seemingly acting as its own self-contained world inside of a larger story — and yet, I still found myself asking, is there something I should be taking away from these stories, or am I just a vessel for the subjects to pass their discomfort and neurosis through?

[Krok Zero · Rating 3 out of 5]

The line on this guy Lutz is that he writes amazing sentences, which I find to be true--though I'd extend that to say he also writes amazing clusters of sentences, which may or may not assume the form of paragraphs. The counterline is that his stories are pretentious and nonsensical, which I also find to be true, at least part of the time.

Here's the thing: I recommend this book, but you can basically just flip to any random page and start reading sentences. There is an interchangeability not just between the stories but inside them individually. If you read it for traditional satisfactions like character and plot, you will be frustrated. (In fact, "stories" is a comically inappropriate term for whatever this book is.) For some readers, this will be a dealbreaker. Perfectly understandable. But if you love language and want to spend some time in the company of a writer who is basically having crazy tantric sex with language for 160 pages, then open your mind and dive in.

In that spirit, I thought I'd excise a few sentences and sentence clusters from the book, in lieu of the rest of a proper review. I wouldn't know how to begin dancing about Lutz's architecture, so it's best to get a taste for yourself. There's plenty more where these came from:

-------------------------------------------------------

"One other spot I was in—the last—was the one at whose center I kept getting even worse at judging the distances between people. I fouled up every time. If I saw somebody declaring herself with a gesture, I intercepted as much as I could of whatever was on its way to whom it may have actually concerned. I helped myself to anything headed elsewhere. I carried on as if it were mine."

"Littlenesses, piled high, do not suddenly amount to anything immense."

"She appeared to be in her twenties and had arranged the freckly lengthiness of her body into a slouch that made her elbows and legs seem pointed privately, inquiringly, toward me. I started siding with her, beholding whatever she beheld—the fishbowl ashtray, the dishful of pastilles and drops, the plum-colored splotch she kept rubbing on her shin."

"There was a girl beside him, a tall leg-crosser with a haphazardry of oranged hair. They had notebooks open on their laps and were contentedly, curricularly, sifting through stacks of index cards."

"Nights, I watched her watch the babiness go out of her children. I think she was waiting for them to bleed together into a single, soft-boned disappointment. There were three of them, and they all had the same problems with time—not just with telling it, but with knowing that it had passed, knowing what it separated."

"She was hygienically delinquent. I wondered what my predecessors had made of the ashtrayish, perspiry nimbus she always hazed around herself."

"The kind of reading I was doing involved pushing the words around on the page, trying to bully them into doing what I wanted them to do. What I wanted them to do was tell me what to say when the phone rang at night and the unfamiliar, expectant, undebauched womanly voice of the misdialing caller asked, 'Who is this?'"

"My life was an ambitious program of self-centrifugalization."

"I had to content myself with learning something else, other things, instead. One of them was how, when taking a walk, you had to calculate what the walk was getting taken away from—what was getting subtracted from what. You had to determine what would be left when you got back."

"In the white squares between the black ziggurats of the crossword puzzle, I penciled, in heavy, ham-handed caps untraceable to me: COULD EVERYONE PLEASE BE A LITTLE LESS SPECIFIC? STARTING RIGHT NOW?"

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved and hated being out of my depth here, with Gary Lutz and his seemingly gender less protagonists. There are 37 individual pieces, some as short as two paragraphs, all of these offer strange and wonderful impressions, shadows of thought, riddles to unravel.

Rarely was my keenness for narrative sated, but my imagination's larger hunger for ideas, theories and truths had more than enough to chew over.

I do wish that I got more from the experience than I did, I prefer inspiration over admiration, but if you read other reviews, you'll see that many landed on inspiration. I just need more heart.

A few excerpts:

"I made the mistake of looking at our waitress, who was setting plates down in front of us. It was a mistake because sometimes when you look at someone, especially someone young, you get too good a look. You see the life heaved messily, meagerly, into the person. You get a sense of the slow-traveling trains of thought, the mean streaks and off-chances, everything that has had to be crossed out or memorized so far. The parts out front - the eyes; the teeth and tongue inside the open, moving mouth - look cheap and detachable, unset, just barely staying put.
What I am saying is that through all this, all through this, I was only loosely in the midst of myself, already lapsing my way into whoever this waitress was, organizing myself within the dark of the body she was sticking up for herself inside. "

From 'Claims', Page 70

"The afternoon was glassy and overdetailed. Meaning what? That I grew up on the spot? That years later it would take great effort and willpower to wave away the first available thumby, unsucked dick and wait instead - in line, if need be - for some cunted, varicosed smashup on which to hazard my desolating carnality? "

From 'Waking Hours', Page 17

"My first wife, my blood wife, had no background to speak of, no relations, customs, scenery. She arrived sharp-spined and already summed up. We ate out all them time and spoke lengthily, vocabularily, about whatever got set before us, especially the meat, with its dragged-out under-song of lifelong life. There was no end to the occasions on which the woman and I got along in public and in private. I remember a smell she had on just her arms, an endearment, something that she been born with or that had traveled a great distance to land on her."

From 'Devotions', Page 27

[April · Rating 4 out of 5]

The way this guy writes, the way he crafts with words, changed the way I verbally process the world. I've never said this about an author nor will I say it about another.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

My father: what stood out about him was that his life got put past him.
It was my mother who taught me the one worthwhile thing: when they ask if you like what you see in the mirror, pretend that what they mean is what's behind you- the shower curtain, the tile, the wallpaper, whatever's there.

[Jasmine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about how confused the world is when you leave it to it's own devices.



I would love to leave this review at that, but first it looks lazy and secondly next to a review whining about not being able to tell the gender of the characters is is sadly unconvincing. This book is absolutely fantastic just as a start. Not to say it isn't a difficult book to read. It is harder to read than joyce and you can't tell the genders of the characters. but perhaps that doesn't actually matter. This book worked for me because when I read it I felt the same way that I do when I am awake. And I suppose that it is comforting to know that someone understands that feeling.

[hearusfalling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything – my life – would be riding on what he would say, on the certainty that he would say something. (14)

This is it right here, life in parentheses, this is the tension Lutz’s “protagonists” find themselves in, they’re caught between “Everything” on one side and the overwhelming notions of certainty and inevitability on the other.

Admittedly this is pretty bleak stuff, Lutz is largely uncompromising. His characters often announce at the beginning of the stories how detached and alienated they are not just from the wider world but from their own bodies “She had nothing in common with her body anymore, was how she put it”. Stories generally begin in this vein, a stark pronouncement from the narrator regarding their own dire circumstance and mindset, with the stories themselves being littered with similar statements.

Human moments, yes, but then detached and alien.

Take this para for example:

Sometimes the girl cried all night as I drove. I would have to pull over every few hours and get in the back seat and put my arms around her. By this point, she was pronouncedly hump-bosomed. Where her tiny breasts had once reposed, there was the cyclopean, orbiculate business of the coming child instead. (94)

It starts with a moment of compassion and intimacy written in regular prose that could be from just about any homely piece of fiction. But then there’s a sudden shift into more a alien tone coupled with the arcane language “cyclopean, orbiculate”, the word “business” is crucial and implies a level of chore and coldness to the proceedings of birth, leveling the warmth of the earlier sentiment. The story goes on to reveal that the narrator helps them with the birth in a typically obscene way and he admits that he “did his best to keep in touch with the kid and its mother” but that it quickly faded and that he repeated the process with another couple of women.

I had given consent for my life to keep being done to me (69)

“Human” moments are fleeting. Characters are detached from themselves and so how can they be meaningfully attached to others, they’re often having life “done to them” as opposed to participating in life, the parentheses aren’t merely passive lines or barriers, they seem to actively tighten and constrict.

Lutz stares through the idealistic view of life and refuses to blame a cynical entertainment network or some other cultural phenomenon for the existential ennui of contemporary times – it’s worth noting that this book arrived in 96 when writers were keen to offer up banalities about TV on “why we feel this way” and for the most part never really got close to the realizations that Lutz reaches here. His proclamations are trying, unforgiving sure, but to stare them down is better than trying to sidestep them and accept answers that don’t really get you anywhere.

There are convolutions in his work, an eeriness and a deliberate sense of disorientation, but then there are moments of ontological consideration that seem to offer clarity and a way forward, a means to live.

To get into the men’s room, you went through a door and immediately – no more than two feet in – discovered a second door, heavier, unpainted; and before you could get the thing open, you had to make room by reopening, by a good half-foot, the one you had already pushed through. (11)

[heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have yet to recover from reading this book, in terms of wanting to rethink some of my own writing in light of how impressed I am by Lutz's prose. In one week, I read it, and gifted another copy as a birthday present (she loved it; she is, like me, a short-form fiction writer). Jesus, though. I feel like these rough-hewn short stories have had an indelible effect on my writing style and I find myself trying to mine my daily life for a Lutz story. I love this book in a way I can't articulate. I know another collection of his has been published recently and I am eager to devour it (and probably give it to some else for their birthday), though I'm leery that his work will give me a giant inferiority complex. His spare, unsettling prose is everything I wanted Charles Bukowski to be as a teenager. Thank you, Gary Lutz, for rescuing that projection of shrugged-off hypermasculinity and the ability to brandish the odd detail in depersonalized prose. You are a perverse and sparely yet unnervingly eloquent contemporary Kafka.

[Pat Settegast · Rating 5 out of 5]

The whole time I was reading Stories in the Worst Way, I felt like my hat was being blown off my head but it was somehow still there – like Indiana Jones’ hat. Better. Reading these stories is like riding the outside of a runaway tank in a wilderness of awesome explosions. I think it is my fave story collection since Jesus' Son. Someday when I’m cool, I wanna teach a creative writing class called “It’s the 90s(!)” and Gary Lutz will be front and center along with Anne Carson, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Steve Malkmus, and Saved by the Bell.

Really, the collection works off a formula… these are branch of math-rock fiction. Set weird verb (esp verb a noun) to weirder direct object, calculate with indirection, return. Flatten characters into setting. Equate setting to a philosophical quandary. Meticulously plot, but don’t appear to. Or rather, graph. Cosine with a faux-fake nonchalance and iterate with ungendered sex. Compute.

[Ben Loory · Rating 3 out of 5]

really hard to assign this book a star rating. on the one hand, it was a serious chore to read, all the stories blending into each other, and all done at exactly the same (one-note) emotional pitch, no range at all and all seemingly done just to impress me with what a pathetic loser the guy is. on the other hand, it was truly amazing in that he's definitely his own writer, doing his own thing, unlike anybody else... though that went out the window at the very moment the word "nabokov" entered my brain, somewhere around page 40. lutz's sentences are good ("yes, but the writing is great!") and he's got an SF-worthy imagination; he just doesn't seem to have any interest in having his stories go anywhere, reach any kind of change or revelation or understanding (let alone catharsis). everything ends as it begins... you could cut out half this book (words, sentences, paragraphs, stories) and i doubt anyone would notice. still, though, the guy cares and is obviously completely in charge of what he's doing, which is nice to see. this isn't a book that happened by accident. no interest in ever reading it again, though... just the idea makes me grind my teeth.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite book ever. Really. No one writes like Lutz. He is the master of the loaded sentence and this book is full of them. Lingering, strange, and sometimes piss-your-pants funny. I kept this book a secret for a long time because I didn't want others to know. When I finally let go of that notion, it seemed like the fans came flooding in. At least at Powell's, where we have sold hundreds of copies of this book.

[Andrew]

Oddball little fragments in the vein of Donald Barthelme. Lutz doesn't quite hit Barthelme's heights of delirious weird, but he has a craftsman's eye for detail, and it's hard to find fault with the "stories" in Stories in the Worst Way. And as a cheerleader for American experimental fiction in general, I would rather recommend than disavow (as fun as it is to throw shade and spread discord), so if you can track down a copy, read this.

[Sheldon Compton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nine stories were very good and the rest were terrible.

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

A palette cleanser from a contemporary collection of short fiction only carried by ultra-specific pop culture/modern day references. Lutzs' rigorous wordplay, the turning nothing into something, was a breath of fresh air but ultimately.... exhaustive.

[Shae Cornelius]

I think this is my favourite book

[Daniela · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.0 ☆ ☆ It was ok.

The only thing I liked about this book were several amazing sentences. The author is great at crafting with words which is why I give this more than one star.

I can’t say I liked these stories: I chuckled a couple of times and was disgusted way too many, but the lingering feeling is one of frustration. It felt like the intention was weirdness but the result is actually nonsense.

[Jon Cone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lutz is a writer of lyric sentences. He composes one, then another, then another, then another, then another. Eventually, or finally, these sentences obtain to some kind of fever. The story which these sentences build then breaks. The story ends, abruptly or not, but it ends. Lutz was championed by Gordon Lish, which makes eminent sense, though he materially reminds me at certain moments of Harold Brodkey. (Brodkey was also championed by Gordon Lish at one point, but they had a falling out over some trivial matter, which happens.) Aspects these stories demonstrate: brevity, grotesque details, sadness, sexual thrummings, an admixing of strange vocabularies and syntactical disruptions, narratives rooted in dream or nightmare, undiagnosable symptoms. And so on. This is a book poets would enjoy. Also paranoiacs. Or writers of the new grotesque. Or writers (and readers, let us not forget readers -- are there readers in this day and age who don't first and foremost think of themselves as writers?) for whom the dark is more intriguing than the light. More effective than what I've expressed thus far would be to quote Lutz. Here are the opening lines from his story 'Onesome':

"To get even with myself on behalf of my wife , to see just how far I had been putting her out, I began to ingurgitate my own seed. I had to go through everything twice the first night, because it came out initially as thin as drool and could not have possibly counted as punishment. The next time -- I had let an hour or so elapse -- some beads of it clung to a finger, and a big mucousy nebula spread itself in the bowl of my palm."

I don't mean to suggest the above is 'representative', though it is suggestive of Lutz's style. No matter what one might think of his stories, one can't help but marvel at his brilliantly employed sentences. *

* In this sense, and in this sense alone, he is equal to that other great writer of the lyric sentence: Barry Hannah.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each sentence surprises and, even better, undermines me. Each sentence makes poetry blush, that prose should so outstrip its ability to compress an entire world into a single line. (A reversed world at that.)

"He would enter a room, odor things differently, then come out with whatever it was."

"My ex-wife: I could tell that a lot of thought had gone into the things she had taken out of me."

Plotwise, not much going on here. But Lutz sets some amazing scenes. I like the gender-fuck (though there is a somewhat misogynist vibe to some of the scenarios, but no more so than in the culture at large), the sexual themes (often queer, often not). Lutz nails bureaucrat ennui well in advance of the recent cultural swerve (The Office TV show, that Ferris novel).

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Curtis Moore (Tin House Books, Editorial Intern): During a recent Powell’s trip, I perused a copy of Stories in the Worst Way after reading a recommendation on Kevin Sampsell’s blog. I got half a sentence in and realized I must have this book and every other Gary Lutz has written, is in the process of writing, or will write in the future. These characters are often wallowing in banality, but through his virtuosic command of paragraph, sentence, word, and punctuation, Lutz disassembles their living mediocrity so he can then construct halting, mesmerizing poetic prose. I read and feel unmoored from the daily, lost in language, and thrilled by each new turn Lutz makes my reading mind take in his labyrinth of syntax.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lutz writes some of the best sentences in the English language, employing a "quirky" and very precise command of diction and vocabulary. And the stories themselves take you on journeys you would never have imagined. Try "Slops" for starters

[Michael Shilling · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alternates between haunting and annoying. Some of these surreal slices-of-life were jarring and scared me good and made me laugh all at the same time. Others just seemed like writing exercises or dares.

[Camille HR · Rating 2 out of 5]

These stories are neither shimmery nor elegant.

[Kathleen Hulser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gary Lutz is stunning, a totally original gem whose writing sparkles with idiosyncratic invention. In "Sororally" an office romance centers on downy arms in a neighboring cubicle, glimpsed over a partition. "Other days you can barely exempt yourself from what you still might be capable of. Instead of sleeping, the most you can count on is getting some cheesy quiet."

These stories are as impossible to describe as they are delightful to read. Lutz has a nonjudgemental scatalogical bent "a doctor said the dribbled stools of a patient with colitis should be regarded as tears." I have only just discovered this writer's writer and anticipate thrilling discoveries of more of his exquisitely odd work. It's tempting to just quote and quote and quote -- and damn the context.

"It was a room in which everything was first on the one hand and then on the other, and then both hands went back into the pockets and were out of view."

"The lamp made a tinny frustrated sound when I turned it off."

Lutz's characters are inevitably out of place, sometimes out of body. When he leaves his apartment some people acknowledge his existence reluctantly, as if it bothered them. "A couple of the older ones unlimbered their arms in a way I regarded as a wave."

"Every song was the worst way I could think of to ask for what I did not yet know not to want.

[Melting Uncle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maximally alienated
Microscopically detailed
Possibly untranslatable
Buried under the unremittingly bleak tales is a virtuosic celebration of language in all its hilarious strangeness.
At times paragraphs are only vaguely continuous with each other and the stories don't add up to a narrative, but that seems beside the point.
This fractured and impractical style captured my heart. I dream of writing half as good as this, and since I can't, I'll just sign off here by saying this book of short stories is an easy five stars and I recommend it to everybody.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent. A little one note, eh? and jesus fucking christ I like sentences as much as the next guy....I'll take Nab, I guess. All the blurbs are Lish-nites sucking Lutz's lonely dick, which come (no pun intended) to think of it sounds like one of his lonely, "quirky" stories. 3 stars because grade inflation.