Lynne Tillman

From award-winning novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman, Thrilled to Death is a collection of selected stories across the career of America’s most audacious writerAmong the vanguard of American literary writers, Lynne Tillman’s work has defied categorization throughout her legendary career—a singular body of work that both redefined and reimagined the short story form entirely. Curated by the author, Thrilled to Death is the definitive entry point for both established fans and new readers alike. These selected stories collect a bold, playful, and eclectic ensemble of Tillman’s Borgesian fictions that span decades and traverse themes of sex, death, memory, and anxiety.With argumentative wit, Tillman’s meditations and reflections on art, politics, and culture are animated by deliciously paradoxical characters who desire and fret in turn, and who are imbued with searing intelligence and dolorous ambivalence. Describing Tillman's writing, Colm Tóibín “Her style has both tone and undertone; it attempts to register the impossibility of saying very much, but it insists on the right to say a little. So what is essential is the voice itself, its ways of knowing and unknowing.”

Fiction. Women's Studies. Art by Amy Sillman. The long out-of-print 1978 novella by the brilliant Lynne Tillman catalogs a series of encounters and relationships spanning the 60s and the 70s. Fucking is involved. So is weird, but in a way that means more than just weird. Think wyrd, like the witch sisters of Macbeth, or already feeling like a ghost, or waiting in a Victorian nightgown on Valium for two months, or knowing more about the cock of the baby alien in your bed than about his face. It's an early work, but already the sentences are classic Lynne Tillman, brutal, funny, concrete, and haunted. This is how WEIRD FUCKS should have always been, alone and beautiful and shiny in the world. The 8 full color artworks by Amy Sillman rub up against the words, and the fine detail and construction make it a pleasurably Weird Fuck to read and hold.

Brilliantly original novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman became one of nearly 53 million Americans who care for a sick family member when her mother developed an unusual and little understood condition called Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus. Instantly, Tillman's independent and spirited mother went from someone she knew to someone else, a woman entirely dependent on her children--an eleven-year process through which her mother underwent many surgeries and some misdiagnoses, while the family navigated consultations and confrontations with doctors, adjusting to the complexity of her cognitive issues, including memory loss. With her notoriously exquisite writing style and reputation as a "rich noticer of strange things" (Colm To�b�n), Tillman describes, without flinching, the unexpected, heartbreaking, and frustrating years of caring for a sick parent. Mothercare is both a cautionary tale and sympathetic guidance for anyone who suddenly becomes a caregiver, responsible for the life of another--a parent, loved or not, or a friend. This story may be helpful, informative, consoling, or upsetting, but it never fails to underscore how impossible it is to get the job done completely right.

This novel chronicles the loneliness of childhood and incipient womanhood, the salvation of friendship and the ties between daughters and parents, by recording the events in the lives of Grace, Emily and Jane, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in urban middle-class families.

Book by Tillman, Lynne

Lynne Tillman’s previous novels have won her both popular approval and critical praise from such literary heavyweights as Edmund White and Colm Tóibín. With American Genius, her first novel since 1998's No Lease on Life, she shows what might happen if Jane Austen were writing in 21st-century America. Employing her trademark crystalline prose and intricate, hypnotic sentences, Tillman fashions a microcosm of American democracy: a scholarly colony functioning like Melville’s Pequod . In this otherworld, competing values — rationality and irrationality, generosity and selfishness, love and lust, shame and honor — collide through a witty narrative, cycling through such disparate tropes as skin disease, chair design, and Manifest Destiny. All this is folded into the narrator’s memories and emotional life, culminating in a séance that may offer escape and transcendence — or perhaps nothing. Grand and minute, elegiac and hilarious, Lynne Tillman expands the possibilities of the American novel in this dazzling read.

The stories in Some Day This Will Be Funny marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman, author of American Genius, presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators – by turn infamous and nameless – shift within their own skin, struggling to unknot reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus, then cool, twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle, quotation, and haiku bounce between lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillman’s preferred subject: the unsettled mind. Collectively, these stories own a conscience shaped by oaths made and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by love’s shifting chartreuse. They traffic in the quiet images of personal history, each one a flickering sacrament in danger of being swallowed up by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking tickets shoved in the glove compartment, a little black book hidden from a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planter stuffed with flowers to keep out the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned with candor and animated by fits of wordplay and invention – stories that affirm Tillman’s unshakable talent for wedding the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence, defying genre and defining experimental short fiction.

We are the Picture People. I name us Picture People because most special and obvious about the species is, our kind lives on and for pictures, lives as and for images, our species takes pictures, makes pix, thinks in pix. What is behind the human drive to create, remake, and keep images from and of everything? What does it mean that we now live in a -glut of images?- Men and Apparitions takes on a central question of our era through the wild musings and eventful life of Ezekiel Hooper Stark, cultural anthropologist, ethnographer, specialist in family photographs. As Ezekiel progresses from a child obsessed with his family's photo albums to young and passionate researcher to a man devastated by betrayal in love, his academic fascinations determine and reflect his course, touching on such various subjects as discarded images, pet pictures, spirit mediums, the tragic life of his long-dead cousin the semi-famous socialite Clover Adams, and the nature of contemporary masculinity. Kaleidoscopic and encyclopedic, madcap and wry, this book showcases Lynne Tillman not only as a brilliantly original novelist but as one of our most prominent thinkers on culture and visual culture today.

It's 5:00 a.m. and Elizabeth Hall can't sleep. She sits at her apartment window, entertaining murderous fantasies, while on the street below morons smash bottles, flip trash cans, vomit, and dance. Elizabeth struggles heroically to keep her wits, whether fighting with her landlord, the housing agency, or simply trying to survive. Twenty-four hours later the morons are back on the street, but this time Elizabeth is ready to strike a final, defiant-and hilarious-blow. Desperately funny, dark, and altogether entertaining, No Lease on Life perfectly captures a woman and a city on the edge.

Here is an American mind contemplating contemporary society and culture with wit, imagination, and a brave intelligence. Tillman upends expectations, shifts tone, introduces characters, breaches limits of genre and category, reconfiguring the world with the turn of a sentence. Like other unique thinkers, Tillman sees the world differently—she is not a malcontent, but she is discontented. Her responses to art and literature, to social and political questions change the reader's mind, startling it with new angles. Which is why so many of us who know her work often what would Lynne Tillman do? A long-time resident of New York, Tillman's sharp humor is like her city's, tough and hilarious. There are distinct streams of concern coursing through the seeming eclecticism of topics—Hillary Clinton, Jane Bowles, O.J. Simpson, art and artists, Harry Mathews, the state of fiction, film, the state of her mind, the State of the Nation. There is a great variety, but what remains consistent is how differently she writes about them, how well she understands, how passionate and bold her writing is.What does Lynne Tillman do? Everything. Anything. You name it. She has a conversation with you, and you're a better, smarter person for it.

In This Is Not It, Lynne Tillman's collection of 20 years' worth of important and compelling short stories and novellas, the protagonists seduce you into their lives and thoughts. Engaging, funny, elegant and ironic, Tillman takes the reader to new heights of wit and meaning through staccato phrases, grammatical twists and sensuous language. Familiar worlds of honesty, deceit, dark humor, pleasure, pain, confusion, dependence, love and lust each play decisive roles in her believable fictions. In "Come and Go," three characters and an author collide. In "Pleasure Isn't a Pretty Picture," the reader is treated to a he/she meditation on the one-night stand. And "Dead Sleep" is truly an insomniac's worst nightmare. A twin act on a double bill, This Is Not It is a collection of innovative and stand-alone writing that also engages and matches wits with the some of the best contemporary work by Kiki Smith, Jane Dickson, Jessica Stockholder, Diller & Scofidio, Laura Letinsky, Peter Dreher, Roni Horn, Stephen Ellis, Juan Munoz, Vik Muniz, Silvia Kolbowski, Jeff Koons, James Welling, Aura Rosenberg, Barbara Ess, Barbara Kruger, Dolores Marat, Haim Steinbach, Gary Schneider, Marco Breuer, Stephen Prina and Linder Sterling. Since 1982, acclaimed novelist Tillman has created these unique narratives that are a parallel universe to the contemporary art world. Maybe they're analogues or dialogues, maybe fictions inspired by art, maybe reflections, or meditations--but whatever they're called, like Borges's fictions, they are their own worlds, too. Tillman has marked out terrain of her own, which this collection celebrates. Full of life and art, This Is Not It is illuminating, bold, subtle and riotous.

For twenty years, from 1977 to 1997, Books & Co. was one of the premier independent bookstores in the country. Stocking a wide range of quality fiction and nonfiction, Books & Co. was the kind of bookstore writers and readers dream about: a place where reading was an adventure, where interesting works would always be available, where writers would congregate to share ideas and discuss their writing. Its closing, in a rent dispute with the Whitney Museum of Art, caused a media sensation as readers and book lovers decried the end of a cultural icon. In Bookstore, Lynne Tillman tells the story of this legendary store and its determined founder, Jeannette Watson, with help from the voices of Brendan Gill, Roy Blount Jr., Fran Lebowitz, Calvin Trillin, Susan Sontag, Paul Auster, Simon Schama, Lyn Chase, Susan Cheever, Leila Hadley, J.D. McClatchy, Richard Howard, and many more. And the story goes beyond the walls of the store itself to explore the state of publishing and bookselling in a time when the very landscape of the book world has shifted radically. A fascinating account of business, books, and writerly aspiration, Bookstore is a vital window into a world so many have fantasized about.

The complete art world story/essays of the fictional Madame Realism, collected for the first time. The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories gathers together Lynne Tillman's groundbreaking fiction/essays on culture and places, monuments, artworks, iconic TV shows, and received ideas, written in the third person to record the subtle, ironic, and wry observations of the playful but stern “Madame Realism.” Through her use of a fictional character, Tillman devised a new genre of writing that melded fiction and theory, sensation, and critical thought, disseminating her third-person art writer's observations in such magazines as Art in America and in a variety of art exhibition catalogs and artist books. Two decades after the original publication of these texts, her approach to investigation through embodied thought has been wholly absorbed by a new generation of artists and writers. Provocative and wholly pleasurable, Tillman's stories/essays dissect the mundane with alarming precision. As Lydia Davis wrote of her work, “Our assumptions shift. The every day becomes strange, paradox is embraced, and the unexpected is always around the corner.” This new collection also includes the complete stories of Tillman's other persona, the quixotic author Paige Turner (whose investigation of the language of love overshoots any actual experience of it), and additional stories and essays that address figures such as the “Translation Artist” and Cindy Sherman.

When Horace decides to search for Helen, his investigation takes him (and the reader) to unexpected and weirdly pleasurable places. "Tillman's intelligence and sophistication have led her toward a quality I can only call grace. Like Stein, Ashbury, and James this book could be read over and over, each time with deepening delight and appreciation."--Peter Straub

An irreverent and lucid sojourn through the facetious, twisted burps we call sophisticated society, captured by the camera-quick and ruthless eye of the ever-vigilant third person, Madame Realism. Each fiction has a terse analytical agenda, surgically dissecting the mundane, forcing quotidian life off the canvas, out of the museum dioramas and into our laps.

This novel plunges the reader back to the experimental and enlightened London and Amsterdam of the late 1960s, where the heroine explores theatre, underground film, and men, recklessly chasing every experience which confirms her femininity.

The first collection of essays from one of America's most exceptional writers

Love Sentence is the third book to appear in the Nothing Moments Project. NMP was a project done in 2008 by Steven Hull, who has teamed up with Tami Demaree, Annie Buckley and Jon Sueda for this most ambitious of Hull’s projects to date. With nearly one hundred participating writers, artists, and designers, Nothing Moments embraces the disparate fields of visual art, literature and design. Nothing Moments consists of twenty-four limited edition books and more than four hundred original drawings. The project expands on the relay-inspired process Hull has explored in previous projects, whereby one artist responds to the written or visual work of another. In Nothing Moments, each book begins with a fiction text authored by a contributing writer. This text is then passed to participating artist who makes drawings in response to the story. Finally, the text and art are given to a designer who creates a unique design for each book.

The definitive book on a creative force who continues to influence sculpture and installation art Jessica Stockholder has long broken down the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture to explore the body in social and cultural space - using found objects intertwined with profusions of vivid colours. This revised, updated edition spotlights the extraordinary evolution of her career, and examines the pivotal role she has played in shaping some of the most fundamental ideas around which contemporary sculpture and painting revolve today.

When Rudolph Giuliani's administration cracked down on Times Square strip clubs in the 1990s, a whole new burlesque movement was born in New York, concentrating less on the strip and more on the tease. The young New York photographer Lisa Kereszi, then an assistant to Nan Goldin, was there with her camera to catch it all happening. She began by shooting Show World, a club that was in the process of being closed down by the new laws. In her flash, Kereszi caught abandoned lockers, dressing rooms filled with old shoes and costumes and the grimy elegance of the empty theater--which was never meant to be seen by the light of day. Simultaneously, she began to photograph the new burlesque scene--which went underground in the late 1990s and has since evolved into a conceptually sophisticated, funny and rebellious medium. More pinup than porn, in just a few years, the new burlesque is no longer invisible, and has been gleefully appropriated into mainstream culture by way of Hollywood and the print media. A graduate of Yale University's MFA program, Kereszi's editorial work has appeared in books and magazines, including The New York Times Magazine , Nest , Harper's , Wallpaper and GQ ; she is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York.

This second issue of Bald Ego unloads fresh food for thought onto the periodical table with a fertile editorial mix of the raw and the cooked, pure and impure, sacred and profane, unvarnished truth and shiny fiction--not to mention edible metaphors. Co-editors Max Blagg and Glenn O'Brien have once again assembled a potent catalogue of talented artists and writers to create a document that clearly reflects some of the anxieties and ecstasies of our age--perhaps in the hope that the balance will once again shift to the side of ecstasy. Contributors to this issue include Larry Clark, Lynne Tillman, Andre Martelor, Mary Gaitskill, Burk Uzzle, Richard Hell, Nick Tosches, Sean Mortensen, Cecily Brown, Justen Ladda, and many others, each responding in their own singular fashion to the beauty and madness of the twenty-first century.

Belladonna* chaplets are short, raw works (often works-in-progress) by authors who appear in our reading series. These ephemeral, immediate works give insight into a writer’s process and timely concerns.A micro-chapbook released as part of Belladonna*'s chaplet series and later converted to a PDF release.Available here

The installation examined here transformed the ground-floor gallery of the Dia Center for the Arts into one of Jessica Stockholder's fantastical, quasi-architectural environments.