Backwardness: From Letters and Notebooks, 1973-2023

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."-Art Forum

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