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.  

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. 

“Gary Lutz is a master of the art of American English. His stories are disruptive, heartbreaking, peculiar, sharp, and staggeringly beautiful. They are crystalline and dangerous, diamonds that can gouge your eyes out. His work has inspired a movement in literature that is religious in its precision and weirdness; he has solved the literary quandary of illustrating the vulnerabilities of human nature and relational dissonance with true feeling and no sentimentality.  I could read his stories all day and all night. Each story in this collection is a song that ruins me in its oblique precision and resolve. He is an American  treasure. “ --Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I have been reading Gary Lutz since his first stories appeared in The Quarterly in the mid-‘90s, and have never been let down. This incomparable writer presents stories that are consistently inventive, darkly funny, just plain dark, and truly original.”  -- Amy Hempel, Sing to It

 

“Hurrah! Here’s to heartscald and heartwreck and all the genius of Gary Lutz to be found in The Complete Gary Lutz.  He electrifies the mundane: he makes wretchedness funny.   These original utterances of loveless love and discontent, absence and defeat, work like bolts to the brain.”  – Christine Schutt, Pure Hollywood