Stories in the Worst Way (Paperback)

~ (Author) "What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life?..." (more)
Key Phrases: Once Once

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 breath: "I was a flask shaped man in a velour shirt sitting at long lunchroom tables in business schools, cosmetology schools, junior colleges, community colleges." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Postmodern in tone and structure, the 36 short stories collected in this debut by Lutz are unremittingly grim, pretentious and oblique. More character studies than narratives, the pieces involve unsavory, self-hating characters: an antisocial college professor with an unfortunate bowel condition ("Slops"); an obsessive, gay office drone who spends his days secretly harassing his female co-workers ("Certain Riddances"); another gay man whose random promiscuity masks a deeper loneliness ("SMTWTFS"). The narratives themselves are static, if vivid, portraits. In "Waking Hours," a gay, divorced man with a dull new job instructing middle-management types on "how to bestow awards on undeserving employees" describes himself as "self-devastated," and goes on to prove it: he has a strained meal with the "mothered-down version" of his young son; he believes that check-out clerks at the supermarket might truly understand him through eye-contact; he pays attention to?and mimics?every noise his fellow tenants make in his apartment building. In a grotesque, misogynist fable, "The Pavilion," a man devises "a new angle on how to start a family," which essentially turns out to be hiring a woman, getting her pregnant and then, before an audience, pulling out her teeth and tongue while she gives birth. In spite of Lutz's flair with an airlessly ironic wit and occasional clever wordplay (an office worker's "extracubicular life"), these stories, all too unoriginally, live up to the collection's title.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 170 pages
• Publisher: 3rd Bed Books (September 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 097094280X
• ISBN-13: 978-0970942807
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #117,024 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cultural Dysphoria As A Lovely Verb, March 3, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Stories in the Worst Way (Hardcover)

Lutz is a master wordsmith. He is Pablo Neruda chained to a wall, injected with heroin and winched in hard between American culture and a hard place. He is Sherwood Anderson nauseated by time travel. He is Thomas Pyncheon finally equipped with the brevity in the soul of wit. He is Kurt Vonnegut leaking sad little pools of schadenfreude.
The sad reverberations of his comedy and the comic undertones of his tragedy are so subtly realized that his grace may escape you if let it. Don't let it . The ghosts of our discontent orbit through his stories with dismal whimsy. It's the best collection of short stories of the last half century. Lutz can do in three paragraphs what it takes others a novel to accomplish.
Extraordinary writer, haunting book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Smart Prose , November 16, 2005

By	J. Dunn (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fragments of an unfulfilled life. Lutz is an urban Carver with a sophisticated grasp on grammar. Sparse and exact, this is smart language. Every sentence is a feat, an accomplishment in perspective. To read this book fast is to miss the point. Sit with the incredible delicacy of Gary's prose and you begin to understand why Gordon Lish felt publishing "Stories in the Worst Way" was more important than keeping his own job.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspissance, October 7, 2002

By	R. Morell "Frostwolf" (Albany, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Stories in the Worst Way (Hardcover)

This word--I know what it means even though I'm sure it's made-up. That's the kind of edge that Gary Lutz dances on and gleefully. He will surprise a reader with a turn of phrase or a turn of plot or character that elicits a gasp and sometimes also a guffaw. I particularly loved "The Daughter," the last story in the book, where the narrator creates an index about his daughter. "Inconsolably okay, 00" This book is inconsolably underread.