Gary Lutz

From time to time I show up in myself just long enough for people to know that they are not in the room alone. Usually, these are people who expect something from me--a near future, a not-too-distant future. What I tell them is limited to the people I have already had myself married against. Everything I say is to the best of my knowledge and next to nothing. It comes nowhere close.

Gary Lutz's work has appeared in The Quarterly, Conjunctions, StoryQuarterly, Cimarron Review, and The Random House Treasury of Light Verse. A collection of his short fiction, Stories in the Worst Way, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in November 1996. He is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the editor of 5_Trope, a literary publication dedicated to new forms of writing.

Gary Lutz, from Devotions
Then I did a dumb thing. I moved into an apartment house and grew concerned that the person living in the unit above mine was following me, upstairs, from room to room. For much of the day, my life would be down to just this one concern. I would walk from the living room to the bedroom, or from the kitchen to the bathroom--I had just those four rooms, in that order--and there this person would be, right spang overhead, the footfalls clumpy but companionate, solicitous . . . Sooner or later it dawned on me that this person had divined how things were laid out in my rooms . . .

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Selections from Gary Lutz's work:

Two Stories
Contractions
Devotions
Esprit del l'Elevator
Street Map of the Continent
SMTWTFS

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