Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and
cultural critic. Her novels are Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness;
Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book
Critics Circle Award; American Genius, A Comedy; and Men and
Apparitions. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years:
Warhol’s Factory 1965–1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore;
Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.;
and What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book
Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her most recent short story
collections are Someday This Will Be Funny and The Complete Madame
Realism. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
and an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writing Fellowship.
Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of
English at The University of Albany and teaches at the School of
Visual Arts’ Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program in New York. She
lives in Manhattan with bass player David Hofstra.
Lucy Ives is the author of the novel Loudermilk and
Impossible Views of the World, which was selected as a New York
Times Editors’ Choice, and the collection of stories, Cosmogony.
Her writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The Baffler,
Frieze, Lapham’s Quarterly, and Vogue, among other publications.
For five years she was an editor with the online magazine Triple
Canopy. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she
holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University.
Praise for American Genius, A Comedy “Tillman’s beautifully
constructed sentences create their own propulsion, able to take a
reader in any direction at any moment. From the opening pages, a
singular consciousness emerges, both porous and radically isolated,
and by stripping out most other elements, the book confirms the
ultimate primacy of literary voice, of which this is a rare
triumph.” —Lidija Haas, Vulture, 1 of the 100 Most Important Books
of the 2000s . . . So Far "If you’re looking for a book to really
just get lost in, this re-release of Lynne Tillman’s dense,
winding, frantically brilliant novel is a good bet. Notice I didn’t
say safe bet, because there’s little that’s safe within these
pages. Instead, you’ll find the profane, twisted, knife edge-sharp
thoughts of a former historian who is meditating on everything from
the concept of sensitivity to the Manson murders. And you’ll
receive these thoughts in the inimitable literary stylings of
Tillman, who goes places few other writers can even conceive of
existing." —Kristin Iversen, NYLON "American Genius, A Comedy is a
novel of digression. Refusing linear plot for the meandering
structure of recollection, the book takes the form of an
stream-of-thought monologue delivered by a former American
historian residing in a mysterious, clinic-like setting that might
be a sanatorium or an artist’s retreat but might also be something
more sinister. In slippery paragraphs always on the edge of
incoherence, we hear about the narrator’s interest in baths,
textiles, underarm waxing, the quirks and habits of most of her
co-patients, and the history of slavery. A portrait of excessive
interiority." —TANK Magazine "If Jane Austen were pulled along a
post-modern highway into the 21st century, forced to shed her
fixation on marriage being the ultimate happy ending, the resulting
novel might read a little like this." ––Ruby Brunton, Cleveland
Review of Books "Tillman gives us a mind hilariously on fire with
compensatory distractions, bristling with facts that may not help
at all . . . The woman’s mind spins, and with it a voice that’s
ardent and ironic, knowing and oblivious, repetitive and
contradictory . . . What kind of 'comedy' is this? . . . The
comedy, surely of a sort of late modernism, familiar from Samuel
Beckett and Thomas Bernhard: novelists whose narrators simply can’t
be quiet, but find themselves yammering away, the brain always
buzzing, dry lips smacking and teeth clacking as their stories and
theories and opinions come tumbling out . . . American Genius, A
Comedy was timely in 2006, and still feels queasily of our moment."
––Brian Dillon, 4Columns Praise for American Genius, A Comedy
(2006)
“The narrative voice is manic, neurotic, self-generative, very
smart, loopy, deeply vulnerable, closely (obsessively) observant,
narcissistic, and eminently contemporary. It is also very funny.
Flawed, beautiful, sacred, insane.” —George Saunders
“American Genius is a masterpiece.”—Harry Mathews
“To read Tillman’s tightly woven novel, which meshes inner and
outer realms as well as past and present, is to enter into an
intense relationship, a communion with another spirit, perhaps with
some sort of genius. An involvement that, like all forms of
heightened attention, be it friendship, love, hate, or pursuits
intellectual or creative, is demanding and bewitching, harrowing
and bemusing, revelatory and transforming.” —Donna Seaman,
Bookforum
“Tillman’s prose builds to poetic brilliance.” —Entertainment
Weekly
“What emerges here is a bold showcase of a novel, a cabinet of
curiosity, a proposal for what fiction could be.” —The New York
Times Book Review
"American Genius’s Helen is perhaps Tillman’s most exquisite
invention—representing the purest distillation of her obsessive and
maddening prose . . . Tillman’s prose has a precision beyond
measure—neither random nor opaque, it is overwhelming to read and
recognize what is both delirious and normal . . . American Genius
is the novel that established a very Tillmanian principle that can
be clearly seen in retrospect: Thinking converts into language
first, speech second, and feelings always." ––Haley Mlotek, The
Nation “Reading the novel is like entering a room crowded with
peculiar portraits, all brilliantly drawn. The book is a consummate
work, one that levels Western history with family dynamics, pet
deaths, Manson family references, the Zulu alphabet, skin
disorders, and the loss of memory that afflicts us both personally
and as a nation. Tillman once again proves herself a rare master of
both elegant and associative writing, urging us to enter the
moment, which is all we have and simultaneously cannot keep.” —San
Francisco Bay Guardian
“If I needed to name a book that is maybe the most overlooked
important piece of fiction in not only the ’00s, but in the last 50
years, [American Genius, A Comedy] might be the one. I could read
this back to back to back for years.” —Blake Butler, HTMLGiant
“I don’t know if there’s a precedent for this charming, maddening,
brilliant, painstaking, and utterly mesmeric book.” —Garth Risk
Hallberg, The Millions
“To unravel the mordant skeins and associative daisy chains of
American Genius is, quite often, to feel oneself gently possessed
by the mind and memories of another. Tillman’s work infers that
such a transmission is an ideal for fiction—that narrative isn’t
just a means of organizing experience, but the stuff of
consciousness itself.” —Slate
“Tillman explores in all its minutiae how true sensitivity is both
paralysing and liberating. When the meandering journey of American
Genius finally ends, you might find you’ve come farther than you
thought possible.” —The Guardian
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