This author has been driven to write since childhood, still expressing astonishment that her stories, novels, and essays are published. Her work deeply explores themes of time and rhythm, reflecting her personal life. The writing process itself is a constantly evolving and challenging endeavor, engaging with what is known and unknown, with grammar, syntax, and words. Writing fulfills her and draws her into political engagement.
New and Selected Stories
This collection showcases selected stories from Lynne Tillman, an award-winning novelist and cultural critic known for her bold narrative style. Spanning her career, the stories explore a range of themes, reflecting Tillman's audacity and unique voice. Readers can expect thought-provoking insights and a rich tapestry of characters and situations that challenge conventional storytelling.
Set in a mysterious residential home, the story follows a former historian grappling with the ambiguity of his surroundings. The setting blurs the lines between an artist's retreat, a sanatorium, and a psychiatric hospital, prompting questions about identity, purpose, and reality. As he navigates this enigmatic environment, the protagonist confronts his past and the meaning of his existence, leading to a profound exploration of memory and self-discovery.
Exploring the themes of duty and conscience, the narrative delves into what individuals owe to the significant people in their lives. The author's candid approach elevates "Mothercare" beyond mere documentation, transforming it into a compelling work of art that resonates with readers.
The complete art world story/essays of the fictional Madame Realism, collected for the first time.
The New York of Lynne Tillman's hilarious, audacious fourth novel is a boiling point of urban decay. The East Village streets are overrun with crooked cops, drug addicts, pimps and prostitutes. Garbage piles up along the sidewalks amid the blaring soundtrack of car stereos. Confrontations are supercharged by the summer heat wave.
Grand and minute, elegiac and hilarious, Lynne Tillman expands the possibilities of the American novel in this dazzling read about a former historian ruminating on her own life and the lives of others--named a best book of the century by Vulture. In the hypnotic, masterful American Genius, A Comedy, a former historian spending time in a residential home, mental institute, artist’s colony, or sanitarium, is spinning tales of her life and ruminating on her many and varied preoccupations: chair design, textiles, pet deaths, family trauma, a lost brother, the Manson family, the Zulu alphabet, loneliness, memory, and sensitive skin--and what “sensitivity” means in our culture and society. Showing what might happen if Jane Austen were writing in 21st-century America, Tillman fashions a microcosm of American democracy: a scholarly colony functioning like Melville's Pequod. All this is folded into the narrator's memories and emotional life, culminating in a seance that may offer escape and transcendence--or perhaps nothing at all. This new edition of a contemporary classic features an introduction by novelist Lucy Ives.
A young woman drifts through a series of one night stands and truncated love affairs. Finding herself in a series of increasingly bizarre situations, she turns her curious and savage eye out on the foibles of the world around her. The men of this world evade and simper, they prey, and preen, and fall hopelessly in love. Through these snapshots we get a biting psychopathology, not just of masculinity in its various masks, but of sex and desire in the early 1970s.
From the brilliantly original novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman comes Mothercare, an honest and beautifully written account of a sudden, drastically changed relationship to one's mother, and of the time and labor spent navigating the American healthcare system.
MEET EZEKIEL HOOPER STARK, cultural anthropologist and bemused commentator on the contemporary world. Zeke has carved out an academic career studying family photographs, gender and images. Meanwhile - now 38 - he still contends with his own family's perversities and pathologies, which charge his chaotic love life.While living in London, Zeke finds himself spiralling into crisis. As the centre ceases to hold, so too does any pretence of his having a dispassionate, purely academic interest in these issuesZeke finds a new research topic: himself. He embarks on a quixotic new project, studying the 'New Man', born under the sign of feminism. What, he asks his male subjects, does masculinity mean today, in a world in which all the old models are broken? What do you expect from women? What do you expect from yourself? Meanwhile, what will the reader make of Zeke - is he enlightened or misguided, chauvinistic or simply delusional?Kaleidoscopic and encyclopaedic, comic, tragic, and philosophical, Men and Apparitions showcases Lynne Tillman not only as a unique novelist but also as one of our most important contemporary thinkers on art, culture and the politics of gender.
From the author of Weird Fucks, a witty, bleak, and outrageous account of American girlhood.