Gary Lutz. One tap of the tongue. And indeed, the assignment felt commensurately modest: to look at the work of a writer I had only heard of at that point—Gary Lutz—and to extrapolate from my reading a chunk of evaluative prose, a situating “think piece.” I took the bait. I enjoy these kinds of tasks, how they hold out the hope of surprises, departures from what can sometimes feel like the drone of the familiar.

I started, as always, with the reading ritual. First, kenosis: Empty out the self; look past the blurbs, the comparisons; try to purge the mind of everything but the immediacy of the sentences. Think only what the prose prescribes, and try to silence the judging voice.

You can picture the reader at work. In chair, feet squarely on floor, book held like a dowsing rod; in bed, shoes off; on couch, feet higher than head, book now folded back on itself, adjusted constantly as the search for optimum comfort level continues. Always the pencil gripped by the back teeth. Removed—the tick mark, the vertical line beside a certain passage, the notation of a phrase or a name inside the back cover—returned.

Gary Lutz. First just the plop of the pebble in a pond. Then, predictably, comes the sense of the widening gyre, ideas and connections breaking in on the “pure” act of reading. The secondary process begins, and with it the harder work of coaching the attention back to the page as more and more notions come to mind. Notions that gradually create a momentum, a thinking shape. And this time it really is a figure like a Yeatsian gyre, expanding outward and at the same time drawing inward toward a center.

I read the stories in Lutz’s collection, Stories in the Worst Way (reissued last year by 3rd Bed Press) over a period of days. “Over a period of days” because this is how my reading life breaks down—no more day-long immersions as I now fancy I used to have. But also over a period of days because the stories, while quite short (few longer than six or seven pages), have a disconcerting abstracted compactness that makes it hard to go from one to another to another. My usual pattern was to read two, do something else, read another; repeat as needed the next day, and the next.

I say all this because it somehow helps me recall the twofold process of my thinking, the first “fold” of which was, in part, associative, and found me noting one name after another on the white of the inside back page. Turning to that page now, I read: Aleksandar Hemon,...