Lutz, a cult hero in the literary community, is known for his intensely dense short stories and the painstaking attention paid to the sentence. One can spend hours reading only a few pages, in awe of his incredible control of language and laughing at the deliverance of retrospectively heart wrenching scenes. He read a story called "The Driving Dress" from his new collection published by Calamari Press. His sparse, carefully chosen reading was hilarious, though the story is about a man who's completely lost himself in a divorce, spending the majority of his time alone on the kitchen floor of his empty apartment eating noodles in his ex-wife's aesthetically dull "driving dress."

You are a master of the sentence. Your objective view on language and meticulous attention to detail allow you to manipulate language in an almost cryptic fashion, one where meanings upon reflection become incredibly clear. Where did this urge come from, to care so much?
What led me to write in the way that I do, with the attention to the sentence, is that my neurology doesn't seem to lend itself to understanding wholes or entire things, so I tend to focus on very tiny little things such as sentence.

How long does it usually take you to write a story?
Often an entire year, especially for the longer stories.

Can you talk a bit about the concept of consecution?
Consecution is actually a term that's used by Gordon Lish, a teacher I studied with. The way in which he defines it, if I'm doing justice to the brilliance of his teaching, is that in order to figure out what comes next in a sentence you have to look back at what you've already written. One of the ways in which I apply consecution is it that as I'm trying to choose the next word, or trying to find the next word for a sentence, I will look into the interior of the previous word to look at the structure of the consonants, or the vowel sounds, and try to carry something forward from what was prior.

What is meant by the "poetics of the sentence?"
There's not enough attention paid to the extent to which the prose sentence can make use of virtually all of the strategies and techniques that we typically associate only with poetry. That it's something acoustical in additional to something lexical.

Your latest collection, Divorcer, deals with emotional distances and the quiet pain of separating in a style that defamiliarizes even the most basic of human interactions. Here, the style seems to mirror the content. How do you find the relationship between plot and style?
Compared to my previous books, this book probably has a little more of a plot in the stories. That was an experiment I was conducting with myself, whether or not I could achieve more of a narrative continuity rather than the fragmentary method that I use in many of my other stories. For me, generally style and language come first. Whatever plot or narrative evolves generally arises out of the language itself. So I don't have an idea for a story in advance. It emerges out of the words that arise on the paper.

I read somewhere that you weren't much of a reader when you were young, that you just stared at the words on the page instead of reading them. Where do you think that came from?
I grew up in an environment where there wasn't many books and the family really didn't talk that much, so I didn't have that much of a direct connection to language. I felt that I was linguistically or verbally impaired. I wasn't a reader, I wasn't hearing language except for on television, I wasn't learning it in school, and even when I would try to read, a lot of the words would confuse me. I tend to just focus on the shapes of the words instead.

Your stories are incredibly dense. Is it the exhaustive amount of attention paid to your sentences that keeps your fiction so short?
Yeah. It would be very difficult for me to write something very long because just writing a single sentence consumes hours.

Have you ever wanted to write a novel?
I wish I could write a novel, but I think that the way in which I write would prohibit me from doing anything very long.

Are you currently working on anything?
After finishing Divorcer I'm sort of brain-dead so I haven't begun anything new yet.

How do you feel about New York?
I love New York. I've always wanted to live here, however the extent of my living here was one month in Cobble Hill. But ever since I was a child, ever since I saw the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's, when I was probably six or seven years old, New York for me became the ultimate dream city, the urban paradise. I come here as often as I can, but I don't know if I'll ever end up here, though I wish that were the case.