I LOOKED ALIVE, Gary Lutz

"… From the same school as Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish, with the former's dirty realist landscapes and the latter's playful perversity." —New York Times Book Review

"A playful use of language in the service of a grim vision of contemporary life. There's no doubt that Lutz offers a distinctive, disturbing vision." —Kirkus Reviews

"His startling sentences are often darkly funny, and always exactly right." —Amy Hempel

"At the end of one of Lutz's pieces I find it very difficult to offer up the traditional account of what has transpired … It is more that I have been seduced, if inconclusively, into a way of seeing." —Sven Birkerts in The Believer

"Lutz's deliciously warped and mocking prose is flavored with a Cormac McCarthyesque flair for words that are either made up or bent just slightly to suit the narrator's whim … In a world of literature that is sometimes too bogged down in style or overwrought with manipulative emotion, the work of Gary Lutz is dazzling and deeply entrenched in the realistic comedy of the human body." —Powell's.com

In his second collection of short fictions, the fiercely original Gary Lutz details a fresh assembly of gravely wayward fusspots, downhearted smart alecks, tank-town boulevardiers, virtuosos of loneliness, underloved lovelies of unstable, contestable gender. Desperate for human contact, Lutz's unforgettable characters listen for noises coming through the walls as well as collect the scraps of hair and skin their lovers have left behind. Written in a tonic prose of singular precision, the twenty-four gorgeously perverse, intensely moving stories of I Looked Alive place Lutz at the forefront of contemporary fiction's depictors of affection gone awry.

Lutz's first book, Stories in the Worst Way (Alfred A. Knopf), inspired Ben Marcus to pronounce him "the new sad man of contemporary fiction." He details "speakers of every category and preference with a huge and painful humanity in common, possessing voices crisply original and knowing, funny and bitter and shellshocked." His work has appeared in many publications and anthologies, including The Random House Treasury of Light Verse and the anthology Fetish (Four Walls Eight Windows). He lives and teaches in Pennsylvania.

Black Square Editions / an imprint of Hammer Books
Distributed by Four Walls Eight Windows

$14.00 | 224 pages | paperback | ISBN: 0-971248575
Fiction | Short Stories

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