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Selected Stories
by Lynne Tillman
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 Tóibín 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."
"This shimmering, career-spanning collection captures Tillman at her most beguiling, playful, and inventive...Tillman is infinitely playful and a master at concision, able to unspool both ordinary and epic tragedies in just a few pages. This is Tillman's best book yet." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Tillman delights in exploring the limits of what's possible within the short story form. The answer, it appears, is absolutely anything. A rich selection of stories spanning Tillman's singular career." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"There's a lot of sex in a lot of places in Lynne Tillman's suggestive stories: Someone will love you. Dirty dishes rebuke. Mother knits. Lily Lee didn't leave Frank at the altar. Tillman's way with words—unexpected but exact—is stupendous. Totally stupendous." —Nell Painter, author of Old in Art School and I Just Keep Talking
This information about Thrilled to Death was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lynne Tillman's latest novel is Men and Apparitions. Her most recent book, Mothercare, is an autobiographical essay on caregiving. Her essays and stories appear in Aperture, Bookforum, Frieze, N+1, Granta, Tank, and in art catalogs, artist books, and other magazines. Tillman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol Foundation arts Writers Grant, and The Academy of Arts and Letters Katherine Anne Porter Prize for contributions to literature. She lives in New York with the bassist David Hofstra.
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