Gary Lutz

Gary Lutz (born 1955) is a writer’s writer in the most literal sense — a fiction writer whose primary audience consists of other fiction writers, language poets, and readers who care about the sentence as a unit of art. His short stories are not plotted in any conventional sense; they are built sentence by sentence, each one a dense, sonically charged construction that seems to vibrate with compressed meaning. His 2009 lecture “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place” — about the craft of sentence-making — has become one of the most cited and assigned texts in contemporary creative writing.

Life and Career

Lutz grew up in central Pennsylvania and has taught at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. He studied at Johns Hopkins under John Barth and has cited Gordon Lish as a major influence — both as an editor (Lish published Lutz’s first book) and as a teacher of the sentence-level editing method that Lutz took further than anyone else.

Stories in the Worst Way (1996, Knopf) — edited by Gordon Lish — is his first collection and a landmark of experimental American fiction. The stories, which are typically one to five pages long, are written in a prose of extraordinary density: words chosen for their sound as much as their meaning, syntax that bends and contorts, compound words that fuse unexpected elements. The characters — lonely, physically uncomfortable people in failing relationships — are rendered less through action or dialogue than through the quality of the prose that describes them. The language is the story.

I Looked Alive (2003, Four Walls Eight Windows) continued the method. Partial List of People to Bleach (2007), Divorcer (2011, Calamari Press), and The Gotham Grammarian (2016) maintained his reputation among readers who value prose at this level of intensity.

Lutz (now also known as Garielle Lutz) has been open about identifying as transgender, and more recent publications appear under the name Garielle Lutz.

Style and Significance

Lutz’s prose is not difficult in the way that, say, Pynchon’s or Gaddis’s prose is difficult — it is not long or syntactically complex. It is difficult because every sentence is so compressed and so sonically active that the reader must slow down and attend to each word. His sentences work through sound patterns, internal rhyme, and semantic collisions: words are placed next to each other because of the friction between their sounds and their meanings.

His influence on younger writers — particularly those associated with the Lish-influenced school of fiction — is disproportionate to his readership.

Key Works

• Stories in the Worst Way (1996)
• I Looked Alive (2003)
• Divorcer (2011)
• The Sentence Is a Lonely Place (lecture, 2009)

Collecting Lutz

Stories in the Worst Way first edition (Knopf, 1996) — edited by Gordon Lish — is the key collectible, $50–$200. Small-press editions (Four Walls Eight Windows, Calamari Press) are scarce. Lutz is not a public-signing presence, making any signed copy valuable. Chapbooks and limited editions from small presses are actively collected by devotees. The “Lish school” collecting niche — Lutz alongside Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, Sam Lipsyte — is a recognized subcategory.