"Garielle Lutz is one of America’s great writers. Why has her literary genius gone unnoticed?"—The Nation
". . . Lutz displays an innate understanding of the grim compromises of modern life but heightens and glorifies these with [her] dizzying language. [She] refuses to let the dreary world force [her] to write a dreary sentence."— The Paris Review
"Worsted feels illicit, begging to be discussed in hushed tones even amongst hip company. The book's quiet ravishments of lives brushing up together isn't incriminating; it's the style that'll get you blitzed. Lutz reminds us that sentences themselves can be pleasurable."—The Rumpus
"Lutz is the new sad man of contemporary fiction. [Her] first collection turns the official notion of gender inside out, supplying a new kind of creature—call it a Lutz—which is neither man nor woman."—Interview magazine
"Garielle Lutz’s sentences are among the most original in modern English, their linguistic specificity making them virtually untranslatable."—Hyperallergic
"[Garielle] Lutz is a master of the art of American English. [Her] stories are disruptive, heartbreaking, peculiar, sharp, and staggeringly beautiful. They are crystalline and dangerous, diamonds that can gouge your eyes out. [Her] work has inspired a movement in literature that is religious in its precision and weirdness; [she] has solved the literary quandary of illustrating the vulnerabilities of human nature and relational dissonance with true feeling and no sentimentality. I could read [her] stories all day and all night. Each story in this collection is a song that ruins me in its oblique precision and resolve. [She] is an American treasure."—Ottessa Moshfegh
"Lutz is a master prose stylist. . . . Lutz succeeds where so many other language-obsessed writers fail, because [her] narratives rise beyond the lexical tricks of which they’re composed. Give yourself over to the contorted logic of this book and you come away lugubrious yet exuberant, having lived for a time in a reality at once shattered and inspired. . . . [her] work gathers a remarkable strength, allowing [her] to battle convention and win."—Bookforum
"[Garielle] Lutz is a sentence writer from another planet, deploying language with unmatched invention. [She] is not just an original literary artist, but maybe the only one to so strenuously reject the training wheels limiting American narrative practice. What results are stories nearly too good to read: crushingly sad, odd, and awe-inspiring."—Ben Marcus
"Get ready for awe, for envy, for love. [Garielle] Lutz is as funny and original a writer as we have in the language. Consider this, as Lutz would say, a 'household fact.'"—Sam Lipsyte
"Lutz's protagonists are, typically, obsessive catalogers of life's minutiae, going through the motions at vaguely delineated jobs, baffled by life, between relationships and wondering, as one puts it, 'at what point people become environments for one another to enter.'"—Kirkus Reviews
"... charged with humor, humiliation, odd sexual currents, koanlike thought patterns and an artfully gnarled syntax."—Time Out New York
"It should be enough to say that every sentence briefly brings something true to new expression: some black shape moving underwater."—David Winters/3:AM Magazine
"The Lutz narrator sticks its slippery-gendered fingers into the sorest spots on its psyche. Stories in the Worst Way is lugubrious mischief, archaeology into inconsolable though jauntily endurable melancholy."—The Village Voice
Originally published in 2021 by SF/LD Books, this is the 2nd edition.
