This one, I plan to fight for...

CHRISTINE SCHUTT

Christine Schutt is a novelist and short story writer who received her undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then, later, her MFA from Colombia University. Currently, Schutt lives in New York City where she is an English teacher at the Nightengale-Bamford School, an all girl prep-school. I suppose I find this so interesting because most of us only get to study under our writing idols once we've already labored through High School and most of college, but not these girls, OH NO, they get it that luxury even before they get their lisences. 

Schutt is also the senior editor of the annual literary periodical published by Diane Williams, NOON.

Her published works include:

Nightwork (1996)

Florida (2004)

A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer (2005)

All Souls (2008)

Schutt is a Pushcart and O'Henry Prize winning author and was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award for Fiction, and Nightwork, a collection of  short stories was chosen by poet John Ashbery as the best book of 1996 for the Times Literary Supplement. Her writing is raw, inviting and familiar, the kind of writing where you want to look away because it has gotten to you from within, but when you try to put it down, you simply cannot. You just won't.

"Another boy, another car, she used to let him feel her up just so long as she could sleep. 'The night shift,' she said to her father, 'is such a bitch. You're always tired. I can't talk,' she said, and she kissed her father. She opened her mouth to him and worried her hand inside his coat and felt the warm damp of his shirt, the hard back and heat of her father." ~You Drive

REVIEWS:

"In the opening piece, 'You Drive,' a grown daughter and her father cross the boundaries of any usual parent-child relationship as they sit in a car, sharing secrets, kissing and memorizing the smell and texture of one another's skin."

~Kirkus Reviews

"Shor through with [Virginia] Woolf's lyrical, restless spirit...A bold, sharp story about teenage girls, class and illness, about those moments when we achieve the miracle of human condition--and those when we don't."

~Maud Casey, New York Times Book Review

"Schutt's writing is sharp as ever, with a keen eye for life's everyday grotesqueries...Schutt continues to capture the messiness and confusions particular to adolescence, but in All Souls, new terrain refreshes this writer's astringent voice."

~Christopher Schmidt, Time Out New York

The Hermit: Gary Lutz

Gary Lutz
Gary Lutz is a fiction writer and a poet who has had pieces published in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, New York Tyrant, The Quarterly, Conjunctions, Unsaid, Fence, StoryQuarterly, Slate Magazine, , Noon, The Apocalypse Reader PP/FF: An Anthology, The Random House Treasury of Light Verse and several others that I am sure I have forgotten. Besides writing, Gary Lutz fills his time as a Professor of Composition and English at the University of Pittsburgh at Greenburg.
Gary Lutz has a writing style the sounds, more often than not, that you are right inside the mind of the characters, analyzing not only the world around them, but all the internal nonsense we tend to forget we are thinking, making us realize how similarly odd we all are.

Lutz has a few collections published, including:

Stories in the Worst Way (1996, republished in 2002)
I Looked Alive (2003)
Partial List of People to Bleach (chapbook, 2007)


 “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 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 . . .” ~ “Devotions,” Stories in the Worst Way 
“Did I ever worry about the smell when I was passing out handouts in class? Because all I did was pass out handouts and read them out loud, then collect them and dismiss the class. None of it would be on the test. There were no tests—just papers. Not essays, themes, reviews, reports, compositions, critiques, research projects—but papers, sheets of paper, stapled together. I’d lightly pencil a grade in the upper right-hand corner, and that would be it—no comments or appraisals subjoined in authoritative swipes of a felt-tip pen. I made sure no telltale signs—spilled coffee, dog-ears, creases, crumples, crimps, fingerprint grime—would lead students to believe that their papers had ever been read. “~Slops,” Stories in the Worst Way

REVIEWS:
”His characters spend their time enduring the weight of everyday life, dwelling on the minutiae of their own neuroses. In a story titled “Slops,” a college professor with colitis maps out all the campus bathrooms in a small notebook. In another, a man passes out pamphlets and gives forty-five-minute presentations (with charts) in search of a prospective wife. Lutz labors at each meticulous sentence, word by word, to create a language of striking insight, peripheral emotions, and reinvented vocabulary.”
—Ross Simonini, The Believer
Gary Lutz is the best writer you've never heard of. To certain stylists, he's a kind of prose god. Lutz belongs to a category of sentence geniuses that includes Ben Marcus, Aleksandar Hemon, and David Foster Wallace. 
--Christopher Frizzelle, The Stranger