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.
“These stories glory in language. THE COMPLETE GARY LUTZ is cause to rejoice.” ―BOOKFORUM
“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
"Hurrah! Here's the 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
"This incomparable writer presents stories that are consistently inventive, darkly funny, just plain dark, and truly original." - Amy Hempel, Sing to It
"What you often hear about Gary Lutz is that he writes astonishing sentences. I think that's true. I also think it undersells the brilliance of what Lutz does. The insanely tight, compressed sentences build into insanely tight, compressed stories that show us what America and contemporary life can feel like, at their darkest core. Gary Lutz is a master–living proof that, even in our cliche-ridden, denial-drenched, hype-driven age, true originality is still an American possibility." - George Saunders
