Lynne Tillman Books In Order

Novels

Haunted Houses (1987)
Motion Sickness (1991)
Cast in Doubt (1992)
No Lease On Life (1998)
American Genius (2006)
Men and Apparitions (2018)

Collections

Absence Makes the Heart (1990)
This Is Not It (2002)
Someday This Will Be Funny (2011)
Weird Fu*cks (2015)
The Complete Madame Realism (2016)

Non fiction

The Madame Realism Complex (1992)
Velvet Years (1995)
The Broad Picture (1997)
What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (2014)
Mothercare (2022)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Lynne Tillman Books Overview

Haunted Houses

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.

Cast in Doubt

While the tumultuous 1970s rock the world around them, a collection of aging expatriates linger in a quiet town on the island of Crete, where they have escaped their pasts and their present. Among them is Horace, a gay American writer who fears he has finally reached old age. Friends only frustrate him, and his youthful Greek lover provides little satisfaction. Idling his time away with alcohol and working on a pulp novel that he will never finish, Horace feels closer than ever to his own sorry end. That is, until a young, enigmatic American woman named Helen joins his crowd of outsiders. In Helen, Horace discovers someone brilliant, beautiful, and stubbornly mysterious in short, she becomes his absolute obsession. But as Horace knows, people have a way of preserving their secrets even as they try to forget them. Soon, Helen’s past begins to follow her to Crete. A suicidal ex lover appears without warning; whispers of her long dead sister surface in local gossip; and signs of ancient Gypsy rituals come to the fore. Helen vanishes. Deep down, Horace knows that he must find her before he can find any peace within himself.

No Lease On Life

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 mean-spirited 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 on for normalcy and 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 &147;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.

American Genius

Lynne Tillman’s previous novels have won her both popular approval and critical praise from such literary heavyweights as Edmund White and Colm T ib n. 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 s ance 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.

Absence Makes the Heart

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

This Is Not It

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 art: 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. This limited edition of 100 numbered copies comes in a special red cloth binding with a tipped in, hand titled and signed polaroid portrait of the author, and a set of fake book club award stickers.

Someday This Will Be Funny

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.

The Madame Realism Complex

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.

The Broad Picture

This collection of essays explores a broad range of subject, mental states and ideas, from crime and death to memory and forgetting. They also cover art, books, films and psychoanalysis, fascism and flashing and feminism, victims and mad love, narrative and hometown racism.