When reading this book, make sure you are in a state of mind and place where you can actually focus. Every sentence and every word in these stories matter and it's a hugely rewarding book if you can concentrate on it. When I pulled this book out in a coffee shop, I just felt the words drift by me and I couldn't follow the current of them, so I actually put it away for a few days. But, when I found myself in a quiet, calm place, with some Alice Coltrane on, I sunk into these odd, dark, modern fai...

Brilliance.

This is one of the strangest story collections I have ever read. These stories feel more like cousins of poems, the dark cousins of poems, grown in the night, under moonlight. Each sentence is worthy of analysis. Each story--I just. I am not as smart as this book. I think it should be taught in fiction workshops. I think someone should teach it to me.

I came to Schutt's writing by way of Gary Lutz's essay "The Sentence is a Lonely Place." As Lutz indicates, it's a book for page-huggers, not page-turners. I read most of the stories in here twice as I would a poem. "You Drive" "What Are You Doing?" and the one with gerbils were stand-outs.

I don't read poetic fiction very well, I'm not able to stop trying to find the narrative and listen to the words. To be quite frank, I usually only understood that incest was happening and that it was pillowed between a hazy sort of scenery that seemed to make people speak and behave like they were in a quirky indie movie. I gave it two stars because that dreamy, floaty quality makes the subject matter that much more disturbing. Even when it's not explicit, there's a seedy stickiness all over ev...

Seriously, the quality of prose alone had me reading most of these at least two or three times each. But then the stories themselves—they were dark, sexual, tense, mysterious, gloomy and atmospheric, ultimately bleak. Nightwork is a collection of (often very) unsettling stories very beautifully told. It won’t be suited to all tastes, but it certainly suited mine. Personal standouts: “You Drive,” “Metropolis,” “Daywork,” “Religion,” “His Chorus,” “What Have You Been Doing?” Will definitely be rea...

This was an intense read. The characters in Schutt's stories all occupy liminal spaces: they are never just daughter, mother, grandfather, or lover, they live any number of roles at the same time. These short stories manage to be disturbing by creating relatable characters.

Sublime. Every sentence floors, shocks and unmans you. Read with caution.

alright. so. when this works, it's phenomenal. 'you drive', 'what have you been doing?', 'metropolis', and especially 'religion' were all great. but there are plenty that miss the mark here. her language can be extremely effective, and yet you'll see genitals referred to as "his/her sex" a groan-inducing number of times. florid sometimes, cloying others. all that said, i am very curious to see what schutt's other work might be like, because there was a lot to like about this.

In the story of our lives, nothing much happens but that we drive past the same town sometimes and remember. Schutt���s prose shines here, and it���s something I tried to examine at some length in my review of her most recent novel Prosperous Friends, so I���ll point you there; in sum, though, Schutt���s use of poetic rhythm, discordant clauses, and lush, often archaic textures to sentences are the true focal point of her prose���the narrative is simply a boon.In her collection Nightwork, Sch

Nightwork projects on the nocturnal screen of literature an extraordinary innovative style: Filmy. Organic. Deliberate. Sexual. Her sentences compacted; words intense, dynamic, sensual. The mechanics of her stories well-oiled, run on its own Schutt's vernacular.She addresses sexuality and kinship, mundane bondage, social rituals inside of bedrooms and in cars, diseases and deaths, with keen honesty and blurred lucidness,her writing most original and raw.The reward for reading Nightwork lies in t...

Dark and lovely. She loves the sentence and ignores narrative, and I appreciate her for that.

Christine Schutt works prose as a precision instrument. Despite the extreme craftsmanship that clearly went into these stories, sentence by uniquely-turned sentence, they don't feel over-labored or forced into unnatural form when simplicity would convey them better. Instead a simplicity, a sublime economy, is their essence. The sense is that there may not exist any freer means of conveying what needs to be conveyed here. That is not to say that what must be conveyed is simpler or clear. Schutt c...

The prose is poetic and often quite beautiful. But there's something missing from all these stories, or maybe, several things: 1. Dimension. The characters would benefit from a deeper exploration into the various and amazing traits that make us human. 2. Humor. The subject matter here ranges from dark to the very darkest -- with incest as a common thread. An occasional smile or emotional escape valve would help sustain readers through tough times. 3. Hope. Not every character needs redemption, b...

‘He is angry,’ the teacher says, and she describes my son in the class, talking softly as he does, growing louder—the sly smiles to friends, the audacity, the tinny glare about the boy defiant. Bored or hungry, sometimes ignorant of what inspires him to speak, the boy says he does not know why he does it. ‘A monologue,’ the teacher says, ‘with glancing reference to the class; otherwise, just bloodshed.’My son’s drawings are all of men.I see small heads, squared bodies—a robotic, bolted quality

this is what I think I wanted when I read Walsh's Vertigo last year...possibly interconnected stories but very much driven by each sentence, often times left adrift, the plot is, but beautiful more often than not

too much like raymond carver

"Publishing is dying and it's being killed by MFA programs and the constant search for the next "it" kid that penned her first novel at the age of 19, blah, blah, blah." So say the vast majority of articles and sniping blog responses I've read about contemporary literature lately. My suggestion is to expand your shopping radius beyond the first 20 feet of the local Borders Books (sic), stop shopping for literature at the airport and start reading Christine Schutt. I had a great opportunity to se...

"the dark sacs of his sex" just say balls!