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 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.
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.
