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The Complete Gary Lutz
For nearly three decades, Gary Lutz has been writing quietly influential, virtuosic short fictions of antic despair. In barbed sentences of startling originality, Lutz gives voice to outcasts from conventional genders and monogamies—and even from the ruckus of their own bodies. Making their rounds of daily humiliations, Lutz's self-unnerving narrators find themselves helplessly trespassing on their own lives. Gary Lutz is considered one of the best writers alive by many. His writing defines what is literary. Contemporary of Sam Lipsyte, Diane Williams, Amy Hempel and Christine Schutt, Gary Lutz has always remained a step ahead.This omnibus volume, with an introduction by Brian Evenson, gathers all five of Lutz's sometimes hard-to-find collections and features sixty pages of previously uncollected stories—including his two longest.
499 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 10, 2019
90 people are currently reading
1046 people want to read
About the author
Garielle Lutz
16 books193 followersGarielle 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
July 19, 2020
Garielle Lutz (formerly Gary Lutz) is my favorite short story writer of all-time. My favorite sentence writer too. A couple hundred pages of this book are home to stories that I was lucky to publish in two of Lutz's previous books. And their first book, Stories in the Worst Way, will always be considered a pivotal moment in my reading life. This collection includes an excellent introduction by Brian Evenson as well as sixty pages of new work (or "Stories Lost and Late" as they're called here)--starting with a 28-page mind-blowing exorcism of malaise called "My Bloodbaths" and concluding with a more personally-revealing tale called "Am I Keeping You?"
The thing about Lutz's weirdness is that it's not sci-fi weirdness or David Lynch weirdness or any kind of weirdness you can truly pigeonhole. It's a weirdness that is rooted in the uneasiness of bodies and loneliness and unprocessed desire. It's no wonder that everyone from Ben Marcus and George Saunders to Dennis Cooper and Ottessa Moshfegh worship inside the grammatical castles of Lutz.
A couple of bits from the newer stories that I read today:
"All of a sudden people are saying all of the sudden, as if there's only one."
"She had no earthly or supernatural use for me."
"She no doubt still keeps at least one of her clocks set fifteen minutes fast to giver her life that extra push."
"Something would always come up, and I could always talk my way across it."
"He was forlorn because there was nothing to look forward to in pornography anymore."
"I was a gala wreckage of decades, I guess."
"I always ate out for the lesser chance of choking alone."
"Never expect more of a greeting than You again."
The thing about Lutz's weirdness is that it's not sci-fi weirdness or David Lynch weirdness or any kind of weirdness you can truly pigeonhole. It's a weirdness that is rooted in the uneasiness of bodies and loneliness and unprocessed desire. It's no wonder that everyone from Ben Marcus and George Saunders to Dennis Cooper and Ottessa Moshfegh worship inside the grammatical castles of Lutz.
A couple of bits from the newer stories that I read today:
"All of a sudden people are saying all of the sudden, as if there's only one."
"She had no earthly or supernatural use for me."
"She no doubt still keeps at least one of her clocks set fifteen minutes fast to giver her life that extra push."
"Something would always come up, and I could always talk my way across it."
"He was forlorn because there was nothing to look forward to in pornography anymore."
"I was a gala wreckage of decades, I guess."
"I always ate out for the lesser chance of choking alone."
"Never expect more of a greeting than You again."
March 29, 2025
Lutz is a totally unique stylist. Their prose could be identified just based on a single sentence.
Take the opening sentence of the 1st story in this book:
What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life?
It takes some pondering I reckon
The only other writer I know of who has that unique a style to be identifiable on that basis is JG Ballard.
These are stories to be savoured
Take the opening sentence of the 1st story in this book:
What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life?
It takes some pondering I reckon
The only other writer I know of who has that unique a style to be identifiable on that basis is JG Ballard.
These are stories to be savoured
November 17, 2023
One of the best story collections I've ever read. Plus, it's actually a collection of collections, so you get lots of bang for your buck. Lutz is a master of sentence structure and spiritual unease. I interviewed her here: https://thecollidescope.com/2022/12/0...
Hoping to read one or two of her stories on my podcast, and maybe have her on the show at some point too.
Hoping to read one or two of her stories on my podcast, and maybe have her on the show at some point too.
January 31, 2020
How could I get through almost 500 pages of short stories and only at the end realize: 1) they're all in first-person and 2) almost every story is about failed love/marriage and sexual confusion? I hung on every blessed word.
This is because Gary Lutz is a poet. These are exquisite poems formatted into short stories--with extremely clever neologistic touches. He obviously works the prose to perfection and says exactly how he feels. There's really nobody like him. The kind of book you blather about to strangers.
This is because Gary Lutz is a poet. These are exquisite poems formatted into short stories--with extremely clever neologistic touches. He obviously works the prose to perfection and says exactly how he feels. There's really nobody like him. The kind of book you blather about to strangers.
April 27, 2025
I usually don't like reading so-called complete collections of short stories. They tend to contain so many different pieces of writing that one feels like going to those distasteful all-you-can-eat buffets, where even if caviar and top-rated steaks and sashimis are being served, the ending aftertaste is one of confusion and regret.
Therefore, I cautiously approached the volume titled The Complete Gary Lutz, where all stories published by Garielle Lutz between 1996–2017 are gathered. Having heard great things about her prose craftiness, I promised myself that I would savour it slowly, reading one story at a time, taking the time to think through each of the works inside this collection of collected works.
It happens that her style is so addictive, so pleasing to read and voice aloud, that I ended up reading it all faster than I initially envisaged. Her prose is inventive; it has an incantatory musicality, full of internal rhymes and alliterations, that affords different textures to emerge from the text. It feels almost like you could touch, experience some sort of physicality from the sentences, which can sometimes be short, haiku-tight, and other times gorgeously sprawling.
I believe that, in Lutz's case, form precedes content. Through her distinctive language, specific sorts of feelings arise. Her tales are melancholic, but also bear a strange vulnerable immediacy. Her characters are getting into or going out of failed relationships; they are broken and bruised, there is something fundamentally wrong in the connection between their passive self and the world. But somehow, there always lingers an optimistic sentiment, maybe an eagerness towards what's still supposed to happen, the happiness of having these sentences as substratum to everything being told.
Lutz is indeed the sentence queen. Probably the most talented word crafter alive today. I highly recommend reading her essay The Sentence Is a Lonely Place, a seminal text for those aspiring to turn language into something wholly different and transforming. (https://www.thebeliever.net/the-sente...)
Some examples from my favorite passages:
The woman possessed an appropriately full, planet-like face. It had things on it I always took for something else—on her chin, for instance, a bluish streaklet that I assumed had to be ink.
The lamp made a tinny, frustrated sound when I switched it off. I imagine I must have unbundled her, peeled off her underdressings, dipped my fingers into her, sopped and woggled them around, browsing, consulting what she had made of herself inside.
Most nights, I was not so much living my life as roughing out loose, galling paraphrases of the lives being lived in the adjoining apartments and hallways.
My first wife, my blood wife, had no background to speak of, no backdrop of relations, customs, scenery. She arrived sharp-spined and already summed up. We ate out all the time and spoke lengthily, vocabularily, about whatever got set before us, especially the meat, with its dragged-out undersong of lifelong life.
Every song was the worst way I could think of to ask for what I did not yet know how not to want.
I’ve had things in my eye, sometimes too many at one time.
The only way in and out of the building where I lived with my husband was through a dim lobby furnished with a sofa, a card table, and some folding chairs. Coming and going, I had to walk past a pair of plaid-dustered old women who early each morning organized themselves onto the sofa and kept watch. Each had a cathedral of yellowish-gray hair whose bobby-pinned buttresses and pinnacles the other would frettily oversee. Gangling through the lobby, surveilled, I would occasionally let an unlipped, falsetto “hi” butterfly out of my throat and into the nets that the women’s squeeching hearing aids unreeled into the dead air.
He was a head taller than I, but he had arrived, midlife, at a way of scheming himself downward as he walked, of wreaking onto his considerable body a succession of indentations, curtailments, so that whatever memory of him the townspeople might, if pressed, recuperate later in the light of their houses would be that of an incompletely statured, sideswept man of unfixable purpose.
Were I to keep talking about barely the one thing, which is that for too long a time I lived in the trouble between women and men without taking anywhere nearly enough of it for my own, I would humor myself at least as far as discovering, all over again, beyond example, that the thing to do with a man, the fittest way yet for a woman left like me to get a man put to rights, was to set him three, maybe four paces in advance of me on the sidewalk and let him block out what would otherwise have been my view of even more of the town—the sun-porched, shingle-thin enormity of where I was still hard up in the hours.
In this further pocket were pencils, a rainy-day dozen of them, that tunked against one another in sheltered and futile abundance.
The day my sister died, I was the first to make a parting from the packs of shadow in the tall room. She did not exactly look hemmed in by death. I still remember her telephone number. Something happens to a phone number when it is held too readily in recall. The movement of those digits through memory gains the unheaviness, the fated headway, of haiku. You feel foreordained in even your faintest of furies. I mean, there was something physical about the way I kept ringing her up—a finger maybe in the ribs.
This sister was the self-silencing type. She was done up in a body bereft of freckles or shine.
Loo (for that was the name she used) was already at that stage in her headway toward demise where it was best to tell people what they wanted to hear. What they mostly wanted to hear was that nobody else, no matter her station in life, ever really knew how much it was that she should’ve by now already gone ahead and packed.
I was flushy, heavy-faced, bluntly forty.
Five classes three days a week, and these were quelled girls with queering glowers, older young women unpetted and inexpert in dress, sideburned boys who were uglifiers of their one good feature, a once clean and eloquent arm now petty with tattooery. Called on, they spoke through the cotton of T-shirts yanked up by the neck holes all the way to the eyes. Test days, any essay answers they wrote foamed out of the plumpest of pens.
His slacks were a button-fly laughingstock of acorn-colored corduroy.
She was my wife of five months going on five years ago. Things hadn’t lasted even long enough for people I hadn’t seen all that while to have started looking a little like other people. I wouldn’t know how to go about looking for any of them now.
“Women taste mostly alike down there, but with men you get variety in their alkalines.”
I was not so much the quiet kind as the kind quieted.
Didn’t I just read somewhere that if, after a certain point, you no longer worry about growing old alone, it’s only because you’ve already finished doing exactly that?
...that is all I probably wanted: sleep in its flattest, least faltering form.
Therefore, I cautiously approached the volume titled The Complete Gary Lutz, where all stories published by Garielle Lutz between 1996–2017 are gathered. Having heard great things about her prose craftiness, I promised myself that I would savour it slowly, reading one story at a time, taking the time to think through each of the works inside this collection of collected works.
It happens that her style is so addictive, so pleasing to read and voice aloud, that I ended up reading it all faster than I initially envisaged. Her prose is inventive; it has an incantatory musicality, full of internal rhymes and alliterations, that affords different textures to emerge from the text. It feels almost like you could touch, experience some sort of physicality from the sentences, which can sometimes be short, haiku-tight, and other times gorgeously sprawling.
I believe that, in Lutz's case, form precedes content. Through her distinctive language, specific sorts of feelings arise. Her tales are melancholic, but also bear a strange vulnerable immediacy. Her characters are getting into or going out of failed relationships; they are broken and bruised, there is something fundamentally wrong in the connection between their passive self and the world. But somehow, there always lingers an optimistic sentiment, maybe an eagerness towards what's still supposed to happen, the happiness of having these sentences as substratum to everything being told.
Lutz is indeed the sentence queen. Probably the most talented word crafter alive today. I highly recommend reading her essay The Sentence Is a Lonely Place, a seminal text for those aspiring to turn language into something wholly different and transforming. (https://www.thebeliever.net/the-sente...)
Some examples from my favorite passages:
The woman possessed an appropriately full, planet-like face. It had things on it I always took for something else—on her chin, for instance, a bluish streaklet that I assumed had to be ink.
The lamp made a tinny, frustrated sound when I switched it off. I imagine I must have unbundled her, peeled off her underdressings, dipped my fingers into her, sopped and woggled them around, browsing, consulting what she had made of herself inside.
Most nights, I was not so much living my life as roughing out loose, galling paraphrases of the lives being lived in the adjoining apartments and hallways.
My first wife, my blood wife, had no background to speak of, no backdrop of relations, customs, scenery. She arrived sharp-spined and already summed up. We ate out all the time and spoke lengthily, vocabularily, about whatever got set before us, especially the meat, with its dragged-out undersong of lifelong life.
Every song was the worst way I could think of to ask for what I did not yet know how not to want.
I’ve had things in my eye, sometimes too many at one time.
The only way in and out of the building where I lived with my husband was through a dim lobby furnished with a sofa, a card table, and some folding chairs. Coming and going, I had to walk past a pair of plaid-dustered old women who early each morning organized themselves onto the sofa and kept watch. Each had a cathedral of yellowish-gray hair whose bobby-pinned buttresses and pinnacles the other would frettily oversee. Gangling through the lobby, surveilled, I would occasionally let an unlipped, falsetto “hi” butterfly out of my throat and into the nets that the women’s squeeching hearing aids unreeled into the dead air.
He was a head taller than I, but he had arrived, midlife, at a way of scheming himself downward as he walked, of wreaking onto his considerable body a succession of indentations, curtailments, so that whatever memory of him the townspeople might, if pressed, recuperate later in the light of their houses would be that of an incompletely statured, sideswept man of unfixable purpose.
Were I to keep talking about barely the one thing, which is that for too long a time I lived in the trouble between women and men without taking anywhere nearly enough of it for my own, I would humor myself at least as far as discovering, all over again, beyond example, that the thing to do with a man, the fittest way yet for a woman left like me to get a man put to rights, was to set him three, maybe four paces in advance of me on the sidewalk and let him block out what would otherwise have been my view of even more of the town—the sun-porched, shingle-thin enormity of where I was still hard up in the hours.
In this further pocket were pencils, a rainy-day dozen of them, that tunked against one another in sheltered and futile abundance.
The day my sister died, I was the first to make a parting from the packs of shadow in the tall room. She did not exactly look hemmed in by death. I still remember her telephone number. Something happens to a phone number when it is held too readily in recall. The movement of those digits through memory gains the unheaviness, the fated headway, of haiku. You feel foreordained in even your faintest of furies. I mean, there was something physical about the way I kept ringing her up—a finger maybe in the ribs.
This sister was the self-silencing type. She was done up in a body bereft of freckles or shine.
Loo (for that was the name she used) was already at that stage in her headway toward demise where it was best to tell people what they wanted to hear. What they mostly wanted to hear was that nobody else, no matter her station in life, ever really knew how much it was that she should’ve by now already gone ahead and packed.
I was flushy, heavy-faced, bluntly forty.
Five classes three days a week, and these were quelled girls with queering glowers, older young women unpetted and inexpert in dress, sideburned boys who were uglifiers of their one good feature, a once clean and eloquent arm now petty with tattooery. Called on, they spoke through the cotton of T-shirts yanked up by the neck holes all the way to the eyes. Test days, any essay answers they wrote foamed out of the plumpest of pens.
His slacks were a button-fly laughingstock of acorn-colored corduroy.
She was my wife of five months going on five years ago. Things hadn’t lasted even long enough for people I hadn’t seen all that while to have started looking a little like other people. I wouldn’t know how to go about looking for any of them now.
“Women taste mostly alike down there, but with men you get variety in their alkalines.”
I was not so much the quiet kind as the kind quieted.
Didn’t I just read somewhere that if, after a certain point, you no longer worry about growing old alone, it’s only because you’ve already finished doing exactly that?
...that is all I probably wanted: sleep in its flattest, least faltering form.
January 9, 2020
People who want to impress you by knowing about writing pick up The Complete Gary Lutz (a brick of a book containing the lifetime short-story output of Pittsburgh’s most clear-eyed and cranky underdog) and gush at the treachery-free intricacy and ineluctable revelations of Lutz’s individual sentences. It’s true that many Lutz declaratives end like a slap to the face from someone who has learned to make you come that way. Still, the cumulative force and enduring value of these collected forays into scummy living while skimming above the poverty line come from Lutz’s steadfast loyalty to an unblinking worldview. Interacting with other people is a humiliation that offers no fulfilling validation in any meaningful way. The same goes for you when you are on your own.
June 15, 2020
Very short stories, and not for everybody. A bit like charles bukowski without so much drugs.
July 9, 2023
One word: solipsism.
I've never, once in my life, read as many pages without finding a hint of interest in another human being, no, for anything outside the writer's head. Complete objectivisation of the un-self.
And yet I read a lot of stuff by Roth. But this one takes the cake.
I've never, once in my life, read as many pages without finding a hint of interest in another human being, no, for anything outside the writer's head. Complete objectivisation of the un-self.
And yet I read a lot of stuff by Roth. But this one takes the cake.
October 25, 2022
Hey, I just read the same Garielle Lutz story ninety-two times!
(sips beer)
It was pretty fucking rad.
(sips beer)
It was pretty fucking rad.
April 10, 2022
"The youngest of the girls had proposed herself out of the least promising of bodies and had ever after let her life take its line from the coercive slants and downturns of her sisters."
June 25, 2025
Here are some of my thoughts on the remarkable and amazing Garielle Lutz. Read it here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/tosh/p/...
https://open.substack.com/pub/tosh/p/...
February 20, 2021
not many people out there can write a sentence like Lutz. it’s all about linguistic calisthenics, verbal topography, and lots of loneliness.
February 10, 2023
There are some books you read for the plot, and some you read for the information. But then there are some you read as a fan of the sentence—to see what language can do when stress-tested. This book? Is that. In short bursts—which are maybe "stories" or "poems," except they don't look like either—Lutz does to the sentence what Escher did to perspective, what Stephen Wright did to jokes, what Duchamp did to urinals. I'm left laughing, though it's never clear what's so funny. It could be the (mostly derelict) events on the page, but more likely, it’s the bumbling incompetence of language as a mode of communication. Or it could be me, sitting in a chair and opening a book hoping for clarity, and instead watching a finger extend from the page and stick me in the eye. I love when that happens.
This was sent to me (not found on a stoop), so thank you, K.
#garylutz #gariellelutz #book #books #booktok #bookstagram
This was sent to me (not found on a stoop), so thank you, K.
#garylutz #gariellelutz #book #books #booktok #bookstagram
Want to read
July 21, 2024Shelving for now—Lutz’s style just isn’t speaking to me at the moment. I look forward to when it does
December 21, 2024
The Complete Gary Lutz is a devastating catalog of lives lived in the margins of language and experience, told in sentences that crackle with syntactic innovation and emotional heft. These stories are less concerned with narrative than with the textures of existence—its clumsy humiliations, creeping estrangements, and the unyielding ache of disconnection from the world.
Lutz’s characters, often nameless and amorphous, are rendered in impressionistic fragments, their physical and emotional selves refracted through the narrators’ sardonic wit and melancholy introspection. The effect is hypnotic—an interiority so relentless that the external world becomes a dim reflection of their personal disquiet.
Themes of failure and discomfort run through these stories, uniting characters who stumble through dead-end jobs, strained marriages, and the slow erosion of familial bonds. “Life gets old. It stunts your growth,” Lutz writes, capturing the essence of lives marked by inertia and unfulfilled longing.
Despite the sadness permeating these stories, a mordant humor often shines through. One narrator wryly reflects on their failed attempts at self-destruction: “I tried drinking, but it wasn’t extinctive of the parts of me most in need of extinction.” Lutz’s protagonists are “losers on the fringes,” their lives defined by a near-comic inability to transcend their limitations.
Lutz’s attention to small, bizarre details—the coercionary part in a boy’s hair, the lexicographical weight of a lease agreement—imbues the stories with a tactile intensity. While the narrators’ relentless self-awareness can feel suffocating, it also makes their rare moments of connection—however flawed or fleeting—achingly poignant.
Though the narrators may feel like hostages to their own lives, Lutz’s sentences reveal the infinite complexities of existence: the ways even the most overlooked lives teem with unspeakable beauty and sorrow. This collection is not just an achievement of style but a profound act of empathy, a testament to the art of simply paying attention.
Lutz’s characters, often nameless and amorphous, are rendered in impressionistic fragments, their physical and emotional selves refracted through the narrators’ sardonic wit and melancholy introspection. The effect is hypnotic—an interiority so relentless that the external world becomes a dim reflection of their personal disquiet.
Themes of failure and discomfort run through these stories, uniting characters who stumble through dead-end jobs, strained marriages, and the slow erosion of familial bonds. “Life gets old. It stunts your growth,” Lutz writes, capturing the essence of lives marked by inertia and unfulfilled longing.
Despite the sadness permeating these stories, a mordant humor often shines through. One narrator wryly reflects on their failed attempts at self-destruction: “I tried drinking, but it wasn’t extinctive of the parts of me most in need of extinction.” Lutz’s protagonists are “losers on the fringes,” their lives defined by a near-comic inability to transcend their limitations.
Lutz’s attention to small, bizarre details—the coercionary part in a boy’s hair, the lexicographical weight of a lease agreement—imbues the stories with a tactile intensity. While the narrators’ relentless self-awareness can feel suffocating, it also makes their rare moments of connection—however flawed or fleeting—achingly poignant.
Though the narrators may feel like hostages to their own lives, Lutz’s sentences reveal the infinite complexities of existence: the ways even the most overlooked lives teem with unspeakable beauty and sorrow. This collection is not just an achievement of style but a profound act of empathy, a testament to the art of simply paying attention.
January 6, 2026
Glutted. I painted out the Y on my copy (which I did not pay for, mind you) by sable hair brush with matte black air-sprayer primer and people in cafes have constantly inquired about the book for it, asking what a GarLutz is; few have appreciated me reading to them whichever of the thousand highlights or dog-eared vicious sentences I’d recently wrangled. Nothing like this! And you won’t be able to spurn the urge to drop pretense and write like this after starting, btw, so try to avoid this if yer susceptible to cognitohazard or stylized influence. Looking fwd to Backwardness (which I also haven’t paid for), and Worsted (awaiting purchase by some other fool I’ve yet to bully into it, or perhaps the same person as purchased the first two).
Read
November 10, 2025I log this on account of the previously uncollected stories at the end, as I have in actual fact read all other collections separately... and only to somewhat dumbly state... what a victory lap! Garielle is truly like no other, etc. All superlatives have already been superlated, but god, if there wasn't ever an author so deserving, these are sentences winding and rich, you could call Lutz the greatest of all of our sadly few malapropists and neologisers. Gladder still we should all be that this was not the last and pray Lutz lasts ever longer.
November 26, 2022
Garielle Lutz is perhaps one of the best writers I've ever read, but unfortunately the stories in this compilation just weren't for me. Their descriptions, attention to small detail and intelligent word play were all phenomenal and kept me going even when I thought I would never finish this gigantic 500 page book. Stories about gender, divorce, and failed relationships made up the majority of the stories, and most of the stories had a sinister vibe. I felt like there wasn't enough actually happening in the stories to keep me excited, but again they were written so well, and each one ended with the me thinking how incredibly talented Garielle Lutz is.
June 13, 2020
i don’t get it
August 15, 2024
In reading this over the last little while, Garielle Lutz has become one of my favourite writers - top 3, perhaps 2.
"I lived in an apartment, defined as a state or condition of being apart. My life was cartoned off in three rooms and bath, one of the several dozen lives banked above a side street. I convinced myself that there were hours midway through the night when the walls slurred over and became membranes, allowing seepages and exchanges from unit to unit; hours when the tenants, all asleep except me, dispersed themselves into the air and mixed themselves with their neighbors. This at least accounted for dreams that rarely jibed with experiences."
"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?'"
"I would find myself pushed out, fully clothed, onto my new bedspread, which did not deliver on the promise of spread, which did not offer anything in the way of vistas, prospects. Next to me, on the floor, still untrashed, would be the plastic bag that the bedspread ha come in. It read: "CAUTION: THIS BAG IS NOT A TOY." I kept it there to remind me that everything was in lieu of everything else."
"Then I did a dumb thing. I moved into an apartment and grew concerned that the person living in the unit above mine was following me, upstairs, from room to room. For much of the day, my life would be down to just this one concern. I would walk from the living room to the bedroom, or from the kitchen to the bathroom--I had just those four rooms, in that order--and there this person would be, all but squarely overhead, the footfalls clump but companionate, solicitous.
...
Sooner or later it dawned on me that this person had divined how things were laid out in my room,s had rearranged the furniture and belongings and out sweepings upstairs to correspond to my own--so that if, during a passage from room to room, I abruptly stopped (lowered myself to a region of the floor where a tossed magazine had landed in a rumply heap, for instance, and then lingered over it rehabiliatively, smoothing out its pages, restoring as much as I could manage of its flat, unread, newsstand inviolability), there would be, at that very same spot twelve feet or so above me, a parallel distraction for this person, a consuming project of his or her own.
...
In other words, there was my life, my offerings from room to room, and there was a clomping reiteration of its being carried out upstairs.
...
In moved mtself and the person upstairs out of our apartmetns and into a house in another city."
"I lived in an apartment, defined as a state or condition of being apart. My life was cartoned off in three rooms and bath, one of the several dozen lives banked above a side street. I convinced myself that there were hours midway through the night when the walls slurred over and became membranes, allowing seepages and exchanges from unit to unit; hours when the tenants, all asleep except me, dispersed themselves into the air and mixed themselves with their neighbors. This at least accounted for dreams that rarely jibed with experiences."
"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?'"
"I would find myself pushed out, fully clothed, onto my new bedspread, which did not deliver on the promise of spread, which did not offer anything in the way of vistas, prospects. Next to me, on the floor, still untrashed, would be the plastic bag that the bedspread ha come in. It read: "CAUTION: THIS BAG IS NOT A TOY." I kept it there to remind me that everything was in lieu of everything else."
"Then I did a dumb thing. I moved into an apartment and grew concerned that the person living in the unit above mine was following me, upstairs, from room to room. For much of the day, my life would be down to just this one concern. I would walk from the living room to the bedroom, or from the kitchen to the bathroom--I had just those four rooms, in that order--and there this person would be, all but squarely overhead, the footfalls clump but companionate, solicitous.
...
Sooner or later it dawned on me that this person had divined how things were laid out in my room,s had rearranged the furniture and belongings and out sweepings upstairs to correspond to my own--so that if, during a passage from room to room, I abruptly stopped (lowered myself to a region of the floor where a tossed magazine had landed in a rumply heap, for instance, and then lingered over it rehabiliatively, smoothing out its pages, restoring as much as I could manage of its flat, unread, newsstand inviolability), there would be, at that very same spot twelve feet or so above me, a parallel distraction for this person, a consuming project of his or her own.
...
In other words, there was my life, my offerings from room to room, and there was a clomping reiteration of its being carried out upstairs.
...
In moved mtself and the person upstairs out of our apartmetns and into a house in another city."
April 7, 2024
already read 4 previously published collections; each at least twice, ‘worst way’ probably 5-6 b/c m___ lutz may be my favorite story writer which is way more than just something or maybe not even true as folks like b hannah, f o’connor, don b, joy williams, g lish, etc, etc sort of ruin the possibility of one wearing that crown. also: though it’s impossible not to know lutz when you see it—provided you already know lutz—it’s also impossible to know the number of lutzes living w/i the writer gary lutz. which is one of the most interesting reasons this book is entitled ‘the complete gary lutz’—kinda/sorta speculating but i think rightly so—b/c we already have the first(?) story collection from garielle lutz, ’worsted,’ which couldn’t be more perfectly titled IMHO, thus signaling the end of one lutz’s career & the beginning of another’s. i have yet to read ‘worsted’ but i wouldn’t, however, expect some sort of caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation in the product, nor the opposite either as whatever first name used or however this/these particular lutz/lutzes might identify, the writing itself may be IMHO the most singularly singular of its singularity in the english language. to quote from the excellent introduction entitled ’lutz will always escape’ by brian evenson re: attempts at translation, “several of them had, at one time or another, tried to translate him, & all of them—some after months of trying—had found this to be impossible. lutz’s work was too deftly sewn into the english language to be picked free of it . . . it was, one translator told me, more exacting than poetry, & infinitely more complex. ‘technically i could translate it,’ he told me. ‘i did translate several pages of it. but, then, rereading it, i realized it had somehow, when i wasn’t looking, escaped. then i retranslated those pages a different way. still it was gone. i could try again, but no. lutz will always escape.’” this from folks who’d published translations of pynchon, danielewski, gass, df & others. evenson asked, “what other american writers are untranslatable?” the response was first a collective shrug, followed by an eventual “just him.”
while i let that outrageous idea sink in let me reiterate how f***ing great he is/was regardless of anything else mentioned above b/c those are just attributes of the work, however impressive they may be. the writing made up of them is unimaginable, sometimes even the next time through. so if this is the complete gary lutz, at least the lutz is not dead. long live another lutz!
while i let that outrageous idea sink in let me reiterate how f***ing great he is/was regardless of anything else mentioned above b/c those are just attributes of the work, however impressive they may be. the writing made up of them is unimaginable, sometimes even the next time through. so if this is the complete gary lutz, at least the lutz is not dead. long live another lutz!
June 28, 2022
Something emotionally ingenious, corporeally vacant, like watching your selfhood from afar, your legs swinging from the rafters, until you slip and fall to a thousand glimmering shards, a pastel mist of a reckoning.
I'd never read someone like Garielle, whose sentences are adorned by such lyricism. I probably read the book 4-5 times considering how many times I reread each sentence. Certainly for page-huggers, rather than page-turners.
“The life of its previous owner needed to have bled vividly into the fibers to compensate for whatever would go unsaid or undreamed of in the new wearer.”
"When you’re permanent, there’s little volume your life can fill."
"Anything hailing from the body had to be worthy of at least flitting relevance."
"I expected to see streamers of feeling coloring up the air between us."
"One instant your life is a complete, if hard to see, accumulation of people and all the wrong ideas about them, and they you’re already half way through the next, garnering moment."
"I was not troubled that things, now and again, could look so suddenly, relievedly, independent."
"He went on and on about how he had stepped aside from his past, how more and more people looked created instead of born, how the days kept puffing themselves out instead of coming only to an end, how the body had only so many quarts of water in it in which the soul might as well just go and get itself drowned once and for all."
I'd never read someone like Garielle, whose sentences are adorned by such lyricism. I probably read the book 4-5 times considering how many times I reread each sentence. Certainly for page-huggers, rather than page-turners.
“The life of its previous owner needed to have bled vividly into the fibers to compensate for whatever would go unsaid or undreamed of in the new wearer.”
"When you’re permanent, there’s little volume your life can fill."
"Anything hailing from the body had to be worthy of at least flitting relevance."
"I expected to see streamers of feeling coloring up the air between us."
"One instant your life is a complete, if hard to see, accumulation of people and all the wrong ideas about them, and they you’re already half way through the next, garnering moment."
"I was not troubled that things, now and again, could look so suddenly, relievedly, independent."
"He went on and on about how he had stepped aside from his past, how more and more people looked created instead of born, how the days kept puffing themselves out instead of coming only to an end, how the body had only so many quarts of water in it in which the soul might as well just go and get itself drowned once and for all."
January 15, 2021
Alotta my favorite writers hype this dude but I'm too dumb. The sentences are clever yet unforced. It's his natural way of writing. Others love it but it's not my taste. I have to think about what he's saying on a sentence level. My eyes glaze. I tune out and it turns academic. It's odd because I love Thomas Wolfe's work, did the whole Look Homeward - and the Rock thing, but for some reason, I didn't connect with Lutz.
I like to think about the ideas and issues in a story, not having to reread sentences. But the real kick in the balls was his descriptions of gay love - being attracted to a man. Nope. Done. Sorry. Gross. No problem if you're gay—equal rights, wave a flag, smile, throw some glitter, love ya and whatever else I'm supposed to say—but I can't handle reading detailed descriptions about it. Makes me squeamish, like being forced to eat ice cream with frozen chunks of ketchup mixed with brussels sprouts.
I only made it thru a few stories but fuck me - trust yourself.
I like to think about the ideas and issues in a story, not having to reread sentences. But the real kick in the balls was his descriptions of gay love - being attracted to a man. Nope. Done. Sorry. Gross. No problem if you're gay—equal rights, wave a flag, smile, throw some glitter, love ya and whatever else I'm supposed to say—but I can't handle reading detailed descriptions about it. Makes me squeamish, like being forced to eat ice cream with frozen chunks of ketchup mixed with brussels sprouts.
I only made it thru a few stories but fuck me - trust yourself.
October 24, 2023
I read this book as it was hyped and a certain reviewers and compared Gary Lutz to other authors I enjoyed.
The stories despite being marketed by certain people and critics were pure garbage. They were not funny, witty, etc. nothing happened in them, and I have read more entertaining stories and fiction written by children in elementary school.
This just proves that anyone can write whatever total garbage they want, get it published, and the right critics/publicists can hype it like crazy despite the writing being not good and about absolutely nothing at all.
The stories despite being marketed by certain people and critics were pure garbage. They were not funny, witty, etc. nothing happened in them, and I have read more entertaining stories and fiction written by children in elementary school.
This just proves that anyone can write whatever total garbage they want, get it published, and the right critics/publicists can hype it like crazy despite the writing being not good and about absolutely nothing at all.
March 12, 2024
learning that garielle lutz came out as trans suddenly makes everything they've written make so much more sense to me
"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."
"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."
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May 24, 2024Bizarre abstractions of the space between the self and itself and others, these glossed fictions come at you in sentences rich and almost too thick. I've read half and have to stop. The stories run unfortunately into one another, for now.
February 17, 2025
This was the best thing I read in 2024. Writing that warps and bends like a singing saw. Writing that you can feel actively making you a better writer just for having read it. Writing that feels like a skeleton key to language itself. Just phenomenal.
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August 20, 2025some of the most exquisite texturing of the mundane I’ve encountered — every paragraph is like a swimming pool. undoubtedly transformative
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