Stories in the Worst Way [Paperback]

Gary Lutz (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 097094280X | ISBN-13: 978-0970942807 | Publication Date: September 1, 2002

Whether unfolding within the fluorescent glare of the office or in educational cloisters in the present-day United States, these crucial, often darkly hilarious arraignments and instigations place before us a parade of marital defectives, self-terrorized apartment house solitaries, shifty professors, sleep-sickened homework graders and indexers--all running through the heart's entire repertory in pursuit of a fitting catastrophe of the self.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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 Best Sellers Rank: #1,415,421 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compulsion as a motivation for living, January 7, 1997

By A Customer

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

Susan Sontag speaks of the need for getting back to the sensous surface of art, to see what stories provide that fascinates in and of themselves. Gary Lutz is one of the few writers who actually gets there. His stories are sinuous, the sentences tightly wound, words spilling out in ways we don't expect. Lutz' stories cut right through to the heart of what makes us what we are. Rather than dilemmas and big tragedies and conflicts, the situations of these characters consist of the daily, little human hang-ups we all have: "If I have a problem, it is this: there is a story in which everything costs a dollar." These little hang-ups add up to large blots on the self, to full blown obsessions and compulsions. In his scrutiny of the family and of the social rituals that we use to bind our lives together, Lutz can be both funny and merciless, calmy telling us, for instance, that "The wedding was curt and almost entirely without result." It is the movement between the humorous and the disturbed, the ability to show the dark and light faces of the same situation, that gives Lutz his strength. A funny and disturbing book, Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way is an auspicious debut. -- Brian Evenson ([e-mail])

13 of 16 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 All Hail Gary Lutz!, October 7, 2005

By 

WordWizard "WW" (USA) - See all my reviews

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

Gary Lutz is to postmodernism what Henry Miller was to modernism, it's as simple as that. Here we have a writer who deserves to be cannonized, by his unique aplomb, cutting-edge wit, incomparable story-craft, and sensitivity to social issues pervading our culture of commodity and appearances...and yet he's outright ignored by the "Establishment." There is no hope for those glib, irony-insensitive, self-righteous critics who think of his work as overbaked and pretentious...he's obviously trying to use his style to make a valid point or two. Go back to the classroom and stop trying to impress us all with your fashionably hateful and derived commentary.