[10/01/25] Lutz, Garielle: Backwardness

Backwardness is a selection of heartbreakingly hilarious excerpts from an epistolary and notebook chronicle, spanning half a century, of working-stiff miserabilia and the dark enchantments of life as a misfit. First published in 2024 by SF/LD Books, this is a revised and expanded reissue.

"Out of those gray middling years of the late twentieth century is etched this unlikely portrait of a genuine queerdo, back before anyone knew what that was—let alone Lutz herself. [ . . . ] Reading this book fundamentally alters one’s understanding of the author’s short stories, with their self-deprecating narrators erecting exasperatingly droll and verbose linguistic monuments out of the banalities of their everyday lives—and gives us Lutz herself as a character, inherently lovable through the smog of her flaws."—Artforum

"Garielle Lutz, poet laureate of alienation, self-proclaimed seer of trees but not forest, has created a remarkable thing called Backwardness, a memoir-in-miscellanea, a maximalist collection of minimalist elements. . . . Heft excepted, Backwardness is the most digestible and diverse form Lutz’s writing has taken, its linguistic-topographical intensity coming in waves."—Socrates on the Beach

"It's a tour de force by one of the great prose stylists of the 21st century."—Salt Hill

"Garielle Lutz is one of America’s great writers. Why has her literary genius gone unnoticed?"—The Nation