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More copies of this ISBN:This title in other formats:Stories in the Worst Wayby Gary Lutz
Synopses & ReviewsFrom Powells.com:"In a world of literature that is sometimes too bogged down in style or overwrought with manipulative emotion, the work of Gary Lutz is dazzling and deeply entrenched in the realistic comedy of the human body. Thankfully, it was recently republished (read: salvaged!) by 3rd Bed, an experimental literary magazine from Rhode Island. It's a second chance for readers to discover this great writer." Kevin Sampsell, Powells.com (read the entire Powells.com review) Publisher Comments:These crucial, often darkly hilarious arraignments and instigations place before us a parade of defectives and solitaries, all running through the heart's entire repertory in pursuit of a fitting catastrophe of the self.
In "Certain Riddances," a cordovanned and cuff-linked office crank pushes his way into a final round of interoffice harassments. The sour-mouthed teenager of "SMTWTFS" comes down with a case of pointed, retaliatory homosexuality. In "Devotions," an offcast from couplehood recounts, in extremis, the downturns of three desolating marriages. The word-shy apartment dweller of "Esprit de l'Elevator" lets himself out of his sleep just long enough to explain away his suspicious solitudes to his neighbors. In "Not the Hand but Where the Hand Has Been," a guilt-ravaged father pours the secrets of his grown daughter's life into the narrow columns of the index he is compiling on the cheap for a university-press book he is certain no one will ever read. Review:"If this were all Lutz had to offer, these sharp sad portraits of people in routinized, serial relations with their spouses and bosses and mattresses, his book would already be worth reading....But Lutz writes the most remarkable sentences, at once torqued and shimmering. It's for these that you should...read every last damaged word." Diana George, The Stranger (Seattle) Review:"Mordant debut collection of terse stories (some only a few paragraphs long), featuring a playful use of language in the service of a grim vision of contemporary life....There's no doubt that Lutz offers a distinctive, disturbing vision of an anomic world. But a little of this vision goes a very long way." Kirkus Reviews Review:"[These] 36 short stories...are unremittingly grim, pretentious and oblique. More character studies than narratives, the pieces involve unsavory, self-hating characters....The narratives themselves are static, if vivid, portraits....In spite of Lutz's flair with an airlessly ironic wit and occasional clever wordplay...these stories, all too unoriginally, live up to the collection's title." Publishers Weekly Review:"Mr. Lutz comes from the same school as Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish, with the former's dirty-realist landscape and the latter's playful perversity. Yet he manages to create his own blend of the prosaic and the disordered, full of half-cliched twists and turns of phrase....Some [of his characters] reach a hypnotic pitch in their low-key soliloquies...but in the aggregate, the works they inhabit seem more like stylistic exercises than stories." Allen Lincoln, The New York Times Book Review Review:"Lutz's short, experimental pieces (some a mere 100 words) are sure to intrigue some and offend and baffle others....Lutz's unique style and approach should interest students of writing, but the general reader may finish each story thinking, 'Huh?'" Library Journal Review:"Many pieces are a quarter- or half-page in length, and these read more like character sketches, though even the longest stories fail to develop real time and place. Lutz's cleverness...isn't enough, on the other hand, to mitigate the misery of the lives he portrays." The Antioch Review Review:"Lutz's view of the world in these works is so dismal even chronically cheerful people will want to blow their brains out after reading them....Other than marveling at the inventive way he slices and dices the mother tongue, we'd prefer to spend our time carving weird musings into our own flesh with a butcher knife — at least those wounds may eventually scab over. Lutz's darkly depressing images doubtless will fester in the mind forever." Tucson Weekly Table of ContentsSororally 3 Waking Hours 8 Street Map of the Continent 14 Slops 17 Devotions 23 When You Got Back 28 Positions 31 Their Sizes Run Differently 34 Yours 40 SMTWTFS 41 Being Good in October 46 The Smell of How the World Had Ground Itself onto Somebody Else 47 Susceptibility 56 Rims 57 Esprit de l'Elevator 60 Claims 67 The Bride 69 Education 71 It Collects in Me 78 Certain Riddances 80 The Gist 87 The Pavilion 89 Priority 94 Recessional 97 Mine 107 Steep 109 The Daughter 111 That Which Is Husbander Than Anything Prior 113 People Are Already Full 120 The Preventer of Sorrows 122 Sleeveless 126 I Am Shy a Hole 127 Contractions 129 Onesome 140 For Food 144 Not the Hand but Where the Hand Has Been 149 What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!
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