Lynne Tillman

From award-winning novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman, Paying Attention is the first collection of essays devoted to her incisive, provocative, and singular reflections on art and culture. Paying Attention gathers more than fifty of the best and varied examples of Lynne Tillman’s writings in reference to art and culture published over the course of forty years. In essays that operate outside typical categories or genres, Tillman reflects on forms including film, painting, photography, poetry, and fiction, as well as notions of fame, originality, embodied viewing and thinking, collective activity, aging, illness, American identity, cultural politics, modernity, strangeness, and time. Such is the stuff that relates art to life, and life to art. Collected mainly from museum and gallery catalogues, artists’ books and monographs, her column in Frieze, and magazines including Aperture and Artforum, these meditations on artists and writers, in the broadest sense of these labels, collide as a portrait of our cultural moment. Tillman’s inventive use of language and lateral thought, her ability to evoke conditions of the larger world in often just two thousand words on a specific artwork or individual, make her one of the most significant critics of our time. As she acknowledges, in a piece on the artist Robert Gober, “In writing on art, words reach for other words, phrases, idioms, and through them more images and ideas leap out.” In her introduction, Elizabeth Schambelan notes that a hallmark of Tillman’s writing alongside artists is an “elegant rendering of complexity,” and in approaching Tillman’s body of work and thought, Schambelan herself imbricates the art, voice, and language of criticism.

Over the last four decades, Lynne Tillman has established herself as one of America’s most audacious writers, a tireless innovator whose shorter works have reimagined the story form. Thrilled to Death collects a bold, playful, and eclectic ensemble of Tillman’s fictions. By turns outrageous and melancholy, meditative and abrupt, these stories are animated by deliciously paradoxical characters who are imbued with intelligence and ambivalence. Curated by the author, this definitive collection will surprise and delight established fans and new readers alike.

Hon rör sig i dunkelt upplysta barer, sjaviga lägenheter och gränder dit stadens neonljus sällan når fram. Männen hon möter är bedragare, genier och hopplösa losers, eller allt på samma gång. Kvinnorna kastar sig in i sexuella relationer, den ena mer absurt dödsdömd än den andra. Ändå fortsätter de alla att försöka.Kortromanen Weird Fucks är den kultförklarade amerikanska författaren Lynne Tillmans mest lästa och älskade bok. Hennes sätt att skriva om våra mest intima sidor nyfiket, illusionslöst och mörkt humoristiskt är svårt att jämföra med något annat. Nu introducerar vi Lynne Tillman på svenska, i översättning av Helena Fagertun, och med ett nyskrivet förord av Sara Martinsson.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice 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 writer Among 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 T ib n says: "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."

A former historian is spending time in a residential home – but is it an artist’s retreat, a sanatorium, or a psychiatric hospital?In hypnotic and digressive prose, Tillman's narrator spins tales of her life while ruminating on her many and varied preoccupations: chair design, the Manson family, the Zulu alphabet, the death of a pet, family trauma, loneliness - and above all, skin and the meaning of 'sensitivity' in contemporary society. Meanwhile, these reveries and reminiscences are constantly interrupted by the presence of her fellow residents, each with their own obsessions and neuroses. In this masterful novel, now available in the UK for the first time, Tillman fashions nothing less than a microcosm of troubled American democracy. American Genius, A Comedy reinvents the modernist novel for our distracted and hypermediated era - it is the tale of a consciousness that is expansive and exacting and utterly compelling.

The first comprehensive monograph on one of today’s most innovative and successful painters - made in close collaboration with the artist Defined by bold brushstrokes, a dynamic use of color and imaginative compositions, the paintings of Dana Schutz are panoramic expanses that offer visions of humanity in all its complex facets. Her deeply subjective approach, untethered from realism, translates into images that seem to exist in a place that transcends time while celebrating the intrinsic qualities of her medium of choice with freedom and intelligence. As the artist herself stated, ‘I’m interested in painting as an affective place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting.' This first comprehensive monograph on her work was created in close collaboration with the artist and features a number of never-before-seen paintings and drawings.

"Mothercare represents an investigation of the question of duty, or conscience, what we owe or want to provide to the people in our lives. . . For a reader, there's something bracing about Tillman's honesty, which transforms "Mothercare" from a record or a logbook into a work of art." --David Ulin, Los Angeles Times 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. When a mother's unusual health condition, normal pressure hydrocephalus, renders her entirely dependent on you, your sisters, caregivers, and companions, the unthinkable becomes daily life. In MOTHERCARE, Tillman describes doing what seems impossible: handling her mother as if she were a child and coping with a longtime ambivalence toward her. In Tillman's celebrated style and as a "rich noticer of strange things" (Colm T ib n), she describes, without flinching, the unexpected, heartbreaking, and anxious eleven years of caring for a sick parent. MOTHERCARE is both a cautionary tale and sympathetic guidance for anyone who suddenly becomes a caregiver. 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.

From the acclaimed cult writer of Weird Fucks

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.

From the author of Weird Fucks, a witty, bleak, and outrageous account of American girlhood.

Originally published in 1930 in an edition of 100 copies, Gertrude Stein’s Dix Portraits pairs her singular literary style with original lithographs by Pablo Picasso and other artists in Stein’s circle to create an exceptional artist’s book exploring written and visual portraiture. Written between 1913 and 1929, revolutionary years in art history, Dix Portraits conveys the deep human engagement between an artist and her subject. The artist’s book unites Stein’s ten portraits in prose with sketches by five artists: Pablo Picasso, Christian Bérard, Eugene Berman, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Kristians Tonny. Utilizing the interplay between word and image, Stein’s writing and the artists’ images provide nuance and depth, balancing humor and sincerity. With a new introduction by Lynne Tillman, Dix Portraits is an unforgettable artistic collaboration. The subjects represented include Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Erik Satie, Pavel Tchelitchew, Virgil Thomson, Christian Bérard, Bernard Faÿ, Kristians Tonny, Georges Hugnet, and Eugene Berman. Originally printed in an edition of 100 copies with the lithography, and now widely accessible for the first time, Dix Portraits captures Stein’s legacy as a champion of artists and a pioneer of creativity.

This book channels the rage, filth, anguish, and the bust-a-gut hilarity of pre-gentrified New York. 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. This merciless noise has left Elizabeth Hall an insomniac. Junkies roam her building and overturn trashcans, but the landlord refuses to help clean or repair the decrepit conditions. Live-in boyfriend Roy is good-natured but too avoidant to soothe the sores of city life. Though Elizabeth fights for sanity in this apathetic metropolis, violent fantasies threaten to push her over the edge. In vivid detail, she begins to imagine murders: those of the "morons" she despises, and, most obsessively, her own. Frightening, hilarious, and wholly addictive, No Lease on Life is an avant-garde sucker-punch, a plea for humanity propelled by dark wit and unflinching honesty. Tillman's spare prose, frank, poignant and always illuminating, captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in America's toughest, hottest melting pot.

A brilliant novella from a legendary figure in American fiction

"I won't always be here, and if I consider that, and regularly remind myself that I only have to be in a particular situation for an hour or two, whether I'm unhappy or not, I can manage it. I've been cold and miserable; I've been lost; deceived; I've been bored silly; drunk; my underpants have been wet from nervous agitation; the skin on my inner thighs has chafed to a fiery red from rubbing against wool; I've been robbed; fainted from shock; and I've been alarmed beyond words or stricken with fear hearing bitter words flare between friends in freakish eruptions of hatred in bizarre locations, since most sites are not right for confrontation, and when I have no right to speak and no involvement, except self-protection, I have become itchy, my skin a plane of heat, as if a match had been struck against it and my entire body set ablaze. But I was able to withstand it, only because I knew it would end." 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. A new edition of a contemporary classic, with an introduction by novelist Lucy Ives.

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.