Stories in the Worst Way

Perhaps best known for a speech given to Columbia University students in 2008 called "The Sentence is a Lonely Place," Gary Lutz is a renegade fiction writer focused on innovations within that lonely grammatical unit. Dense and strange, the short fictions of his collection Stories in the Worst Way might better be called prose poems than stories, with Lutz creating highly unpredictable sentences that evoke character or a static emotional state rather than advancing the plot through traditional narrative action. Incredibly compressed, Lutz's short stories privilege characters disenfranchised from themselves; indeed, the collection takes its title from a short story in which a man—presumably a stand-in for Lutz himself—recounts writing about a moment until he feels at "a great many far cries" from himself. Emblematic of the problems Lutz's work presents, this story encompasses a complex emotional phenomenon with great precision while, frustratingly, sometimes obscuring even the most minimal plot development. Ultimately, the pieces in Stories in the Worst Way ought not be read for the experiences offered by plot or setting but for the pleasures of their many thrilling sentences.