Worsted

by Garielle Lutz

Worsted is a collection of fourteen new stories by the author of The Complete Gary Lutz. Some excerpts appeared in Chicago Review, Lake Effect, and South Carolina Review, as well as online at Hobart, Post Road, and Southwest Review.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literary Fiction

215 pages, Paperback

Published April 2, 2021

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

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having known and been a huge Lutz fan for a couple of decades now, it's intriguing to see the subtle changes in her writing career. Worsted pairs Lutz with another great small press, Short Flight Long Drive, under the editorial vision of literary badass Elizabeth Ellen. This pairing results in some of the most direct and overtly humorous stories of Lutz's career, even evoking Lutz's earliest work writing under the pen name Lee Stone (see "Home, School, Office" and "Six Stories" from Partial List of People to Bleach). This slightly pared-down style is most evident in the 54-page opener, "Worsted." The story, "Rules for Tenants" could almost be a McSweeney's humor piece (that's a compliment). Other stories startle us back into Lutzian sentence-land—a land where words and language create new sensations and images in your brain that you never knew were in there. I've quoted from Lutz's stories many many times in the past but this time I'll leave it up to you, because the joy of reading Garielle Lutz is the shock of how she makes the story form a new, original animal with every book.

[George]

"The mitosis of misery, the cloning of loneliness."

You can read my review here: https://thecollidescope.com/2025/08/1...

I also received a lovely email from Lutz herself, which makes such efforts all the more worth the time and energy: "Thank you so much for that thrilling, beautifully expressed review, full of such deep understanding of my book! I am very grateful for such a brilliantly attentive reading!"

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worsted is a collection of stories that mischievously fails to explain what life is about. Life, with its drama, sadness, humor, intimacies, and absurdities is told in tangential fragments. Each sentence is rich with rhymes, almost-rhymes and alliterations. You don’t read Lutz for the plot (there isn’t any) or the characters (left as unfinished sketches). You read Lutz for the language, word-choices, rhythms and sounds which fizz, tinkle and bong on the page. In the essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” Lutz writes that the sentence is like a theater where writing attains its ultimacy. Lutz produces “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.”

Some examples:

“My life reeks of other people, least of all me. As a boy, I’d been daughterish, dawdling — hardly the type to stay put in the lineage. Of my parents’ bedroom I remember mostly a bedside table that opened only from the back.”

“It was mostly students who dropped by, students in curricular dishevelment…Once in a while he would get a student on the lookout for herself in everyone she met. There were never enough of these.”

“It was as if we could look all the way through her, back to when she’d been babysat. But we could picture the babysitters only partway, only about as far up as just above the knees. Anything further up on those girls must have long ago been crossed out or cut off. Their breasts, their arms and faces, were as much as zilch to us. Their voices might as well have been smoke. But why is it that there’s never enough to people? Why must my own life remain to be seen?”

“(One morning alone, I was taken for a Lisa, a Cindy, an Andrea.) It was a good thing because it got me thinking that I might possibly have the markings in me of some other person completely. One hand may wash the other, I mean, and both hands may wash the face, but the shoe is always on the other foot.”

The language is glorious and the humor devastating.

[Meg Tuite · Rating 5 out of 5]

I pretty much underlined every sentence in this collection! Garielle Lutz is incomparable! Holy shit! Brilliant, hilarious, and unforgettable line by line! Get a copy of everything she writes and has written!
Some quotes: "Her life was laid out for her in tiny furies." "The girl opened her mouth. Shreds, strewings, chippings of an alphabet fell out." "The lower half of her face barely made it up to the upper half anymore." "He started loitering his nights away in the shallows of the slipcovers."
"What's the point in grieving for people if all they do is just keep coming back?"
"People walked loathingly past me on their way to other people."
"I have never liked feeling a point of view being trained on me too sharply."

This book, all her books, will be with me forever! DEEP LOVE!!

[cycads and ferns · Rating 5 out of 5]

“…his oldest is rarely present for what her life entails...she is never quite actually in person and instead operates on a kind of delay, trailing after herself in her own wake, sinking only with reluctance into her accumulated life, then backing out again...she's working part-time for a caterer and writing songs about herself. Most of the songs have the same title: ‘I Do Most of the Business Cards Around Here.’”

I have no idea why I ordered this book of short stories by Gabrielle Lutz. I noticed though, after the purchase, that I had saved her larger collection, The Complete Gary Lutz, years ago.

“…I was living with a groggily scholarly older man...He did not want me to work...wanted me staying put at home, daintily abed...the poor guy had yet to find out that I had all along been overdoing it with a scathingly blond...woman who was married…I set limits, and then I cheat. It's darker in a room that has people in it than in one that doesn't.”

Fourteen stories later and I am completely smitten. I cannot begin to explain why.

“One night she wanted to know something about me. I coughed out an account of myself. I tried to make a case for having once wanted a full and tiring life. I described a bounteous enough marriage to a wife summarily venerated, a wife who sipped at life through last straws....”

Her protagonists’ inner lives and external circumstances were described with all their messiness and uncertainties and within those ambiguities, I felt that I touched the truth.

“Linni? The closest I ever got to myself was when I watched her take me into her eyes…Almost every day I run into the man she's involved with. At a quick-serve Chinese place, I'm served a bowl of rice with a hair in it, and I tell myself, ‘Good, I've got some company.’ People add up like that….
She asked if I'd be up for picturing her life as continent after continent of graph paper not even written on a little. Such are the sweatful exactions of somebody trying somebody else's damnedest to be somebody else still.”

[Ethan Ksiazek · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven’t felt up to reading lately—which certainly sucks. Reading for me, like many, is haven, safedom, and some other liquor for my mind to bathe in. Garielle Lutz is so sacred to me. It’s ritualistic. Reading sentence by segment, the gestalt of my joy is however seamless. My emotions reading this piece have been a fucking maelstrom. Lutz is quite obviously terrified of something, fixated on a figure concrete in a world of abstractions—maybe some evolutionary thing. But no one else handles the gravity of the world with such prettyism, lyrical verve, and stark attention to how floridly English words can be wedded to the feelings they clothe. Fiver for life, fan forevermore.

[Morbid Swither · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most gifted author I have ever read. To me a form and style that is revolutionary and worthy of study for anyone interested in linguistics, grammar, poetry or literature. I would give Lutz every award, they blow my mind!

[crowjonah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forget “a writer’s writer”—Garielle Lutz is your favorite writer’s favorite drug, and not the kind that might get legalized if the right people win a couple of votes. Worsted feels illicit, begging to be discussed in hushed tones even amongst hip company. The book’s quiet ravishments of lives brushing up together isn’t incriminating; it’s the style that’ll get you blitzed. Lutz reminds us that sentences themselves can be pleasurable.

Worsted feverishly accelerates through a career’s worth of preoccupations: “unrenewable romances,” “venerealizing double binds, affections filched,” “[failure] at both asceticism and lechery.” It’s also Lutz’s longest story collection, flex far beyond the pungent one-pagers that come to familiar readers’ minds.

Mark Baumer once said he’d like his work to be large enough to do “considerable damage” if thrown at someone. Depending on where in her library she found herself, a short story reader intent on making you hurt would do just as well to reach toward the ever-growing catalog of Lutz as toward Amy Hempel or Diane Williams. More than just another projectile, Worsted strengthens the case for a Lutzian school.

(—Ripped off my own intro from an interview I did with Garielle for The Rumpus! https://therumpus.net/2021/04/the-rum...)

[Devin Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

full of these tangential, keen stories and some of the most remarkable sentences I've ever read

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worsted by Garielle Lutz is a collection of what I would guess you can call short stories, however, the reality when reading Lutz it is less about reading a story and more about reading and experiencing words.

Lutz is a classically experimental writer, and her sentences are truly insanely fashioned, bending words to her will with unique conjugations and uses, often stretching definitions of words and frequently changing a noun into some kind of adverb or adjective that you’ve never considered in your life. The book is a collection of sentences unlike any you’ve ever heard or read before, and the word choices surprise, delight and sometimes maybe upset you. Through this short work, the operant mode seems to be to explore how tenuously you can stretch words and sentences into coherent meaning. In this effort, Lutz is masterful, creating stark images, weird characters, and what I can only approximate as free associative “narratives.”

The words, the sentences are just deliciously weird and inimitably Lutz’s, however, about two-thirds through the collection, I did begin to yearn a bit for a little more in the way of character or narrative. I understand these are not really concerns of Lutz’s project, but for me, it transforms the work into more a work of free verse poetry rather than fiction, which my brain is much more well-wired for reading. Don’t get me wrong, there are poems and poets whose work I can live in as much among the greatest novelists, but even then, there’s a bit of an askance mentality for me to really immerse myself. I can’t help wonder what Lutz’s “stories” would look like with a similar kind of approach to narrative structure as she takes with her word choices and sentence structures. Something labyrinthine and unexpected at every turn, but developing toward some narrative arc (or sinewave, or pulse wave, or whatever).

In the end, I think that’s what slightly disappoints me because, unless I memorize some certain sentences or syntax, I’m kind of at a loss on what to talk about with the book—and in reality, I’m likely too dull/ineffective a reader to really “get” what’s going on in these collected pieces in their poetic formulation.

Definitely something for those who crave experimental and avantgarde approaches to art, as this is the most experimental writing I’ve read since maybe Vanessa Place’s La Medusa.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But which summer was my saddest? The one between seventh grade and eighth? One morning, I dared to watch an old Abbott and Costello show. I expected my mother any moment to rush back in from her clotheslines and start shouting, "Get out of the house! Go outside! Or are you afraid somebody might see you?" I watched Lou Costello buy a "slice" of vanilla ice cream from a vendor in a park, and I wanted to run out to the kitchen for the half-gallon of Weis Carnival-brand van-choc-straw (the cheapest, waxiest kind anyone then could buy) still forsaken in the freezer. I wanted to knife it into slices. I wanted to get everything life-lorn about this life slit out of its wits."

"The few males left tended to have beards. I can understand a face wanting to cover itself up."

I have frequently been skeptical of the premise that a great sentence can be so many times greater in effect than an average one. Surely it can be much better, but how much better? Here is a book that may falsify my hypothesis, for particular passages left me spellbound, and though sometimes a cumulative effect, clearly the atomic unit of this feeling is in its sentences.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overall, not this specific book, but here is what I wrote on Lutz. A remarkable writer... of course. Read it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/tosh/p/...

[Colleen Grablick · Rating 4 out of 5]

first book of the year! sometimes you read something and you’re like i should probably give up on writing as i have never made a sentence like what’s going on here …

[Conner · Rating 5 out of 5]

She can’t be stopped

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like Garielle Lutz, a lot. All the things I love about texts (humor, sentence-level games, apt diction, conspiratorial voice) are present. I could never presume to sum up what it means to be Lutzesque, but if you want a perspective on it, Brian Evenson’s introduction to The Complete Gary Lutz which came out in 2019 from NEW YORK TYRANT is a good starting point. I like how that volume completes Gary, and now, with Worsted, Garielle has stood up and stretched at the starting blocks.

It’s hard to express why Lutz’s writing is so important and necessary. I think fans of Thomas Pynchon might know this feeling. To the very attentive, Pynchon’s writing is very funny. His characters are fully formed, with imaginations and personal histories, families, careers and faults, always on the move. The same, on a micro level, can be said for Lutz’s characters. These grimy heroes groove with small, signature tics over 30-page constructs: they twitch, or scratch, or stare. They carp. They fret about bathroom locks. On a novel scale, Pynchon’s characters hop in taxis and sweep through whole cities adrip with inside-jokes, wisecracks, hearts-on-sleeve, and brand-name details over the course of 500 pages. Lutz’s characters are the wallflowers, the snoops, the mall-tutors on lunch break who blend into the scenery. Speaking of scenery, I like how in the first pages, the text instructs: it “was a city full of buildings with plenty of entrances easy to miss.” Yes, there are a lot of entries into the craft of Lutz. Linguistic club doors whose bouncers dictate entry, based on taste.

For my full review, link here: https://anneweisgerber.com/2021/09/18...

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going to spend a day or two withdrawing from this book. Having so thoroughly immersed myself into these stories, having spent so much time jotting down or snapping a photo of my favorite lines from this book (now kept in a little 'Worsted' folder in "Notes" on my phone), I need to detox. How can I go from this (with lines like, "Their smiles were always turning corners" and "They had hair the color of butcher paper, and breasts that looked underprompted by those bras, and each, I imagined, had a heartache not yet put to enough ungoodening use.") to another book without considerable pause?
My copy of Worsted is a little 4" x 6" concentration of schizophrenic poetics (with all the made up words to boot). Reading this was like talking to my grandmother in the final grips of dementia. Bits of clarity amongst a sea of swirling, seemingly nonsensical background that actually created an incomparable image of her perspective of her world. This is Worsted.
It's going to hurt to be off of this one.

[Reuben Slade · Rating 5 out of 5]

"From early on, I'd had to be taught to never be heard from again, but at some point in my forties I began noticing these three who rose buses all day long, just as I did, and their ridership looked even more devotional, more engrossing, than mine. The towns the buses passed through must have begun bunching up in their minds as a single, solitary place that any lore had long ago run off from, a place to turn their backs on, until the driver ordered them off. I always thought the driver meany me, too, but he always made a point of saying, "Not you, lady," and then I would say that it was my stop anyway, and he would try to trap me in some small talk. By the time I'd work myself free from him, the girls were always already gone. Was it so terribly wrong, though, for to wonder where they went?"

[Yuri Deliberalli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Os contos de Garielle Lutz não seguem uma linha lógica de narração, não apresentam nomes de personagens e são focados na efemeridade do cotidiano, banais como a normalidade, mas cuja prosa é tão fixada na estrutura das frases que acabam por exalar um forte estado de ser de seus narradores. As variações de humor são abruptas e há um encarceramento ao rotineiro que desconcerta pela falta de ambição desses personagens. Por vezes, a prosa é hermética demais; por vezes, é tão solitária quanto as frases que a compõe.

[Dave Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a writer, there are worse things you could do than embark upon a diet of one Garielle Lutz sentence per day. Like a chewy multivitamin, or a baby aspirin at bedtime – a preventive regimen against lexical decay. Through her somersaultive synaesthetics she observes in ekphrastic polybeige the wondrous mundanities of lives obsolesced. These stories hit like fake ficuses you for years thought were real; vertical blinds segmenting bad sex in piano key shadow; brillo pad carpeting to scratch your itchy soles. Not one word is wasted. You sometimes wish she’d waste one, just to see.

[Jason Schwartzman · Rating 5 out of 5]

So original and gripping in its language. The sentences feels like they build a whole new vernacular, which made me think of how much in us is unexpressed, how normatively we conform through language (a lot of the time), how much swims below our forms. Think I'll read it again sometime but out loud to bring the unique, compelling sentences into the room!

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories feel almost long-form from Lutz, as intense as ever but more expansive. I feel like previous stories tend to be moments or singular situations in the bizarre lives of others, these stories seem to capture whole lives of squelching human strangeness.

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lutz is one of my favorite writers. Her agility and inventiveness with language astounds. I savored every word. This is poetry repurposed as engrossing short fiction. Very few practitioners of the form can sustain this approach--Kate Braverman comes to mind. But Lutz is in a category all her own.

[Begoniah Bellicose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like a dream...

[Dar Vig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

singular

[LV · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrible cover. Still one of the best sentence makers.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

above my pay grade, but still liked it

[in8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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