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.
Here's an Author's Bio. It could be written differently. I've written many for myself and read lots of other people's. None is right or sufficient, each slants one way or the other. So, a kind of fiction - selection of events and facts.. So let me just say: I wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. That I actually do write stories and novels and essays, and that they get published, still astonishes me. Right now, I'm working on a novel, my sixth, and also some stories and will be working on an art essay or two soon.
In April, a new collection of stories, Someday This Will Be Funny, will be pubbed by Red Lemonade Press. There is no story called Someday This Will Be Funny in it: it's a title that comments on all the stories, maybe.
Each spring, I teach writing at University at Albany, in the English Dept., and in the fall, at The New School, in the Writing Dept.
I've lived with David Hofstra, a bass player, for many years. It makes a lot of sense to me that I live with a bass player, since time and rhythm are extremely important to my writing. He's also a wonderful man.
As time goes by, my thoughts about writing change, how to write THIS, or why I do. There are no stable answers to a process that changes, and a life that does too. Writing, when I'm inhabiting its world, makes me happy, or less unhappy. I also feel engaged in and caught up in politics here, and in worlds farther away.
When I work inside the world in which I do make choices, I'm completely absorbed in what happens, in what can emerge. Writing is a beautiful, difficult relationship with what you know and don't know, have or haven't experienced, with grammar and syntax, with words, primarily, with ideas, and with everything else that's been written.
