Lynne Tillman
Personal Information
Description
Lynne Tillman (New York, NY) is the author of five novels, two collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two nonfiction books. She has collaborated often with artists and writes regularly on culture. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1997) which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast in Doubt (1992), Motion Sickness (1991), and Haunted Houses (1995). Absence Makes the Heart (1990) and The Broad Picture (1997) are both collections of Tillman's essays that were published in literary and art periodicals. She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, Associate Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship.
Books
Stephen Shore
"Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places has influenced a generation of photographers. Among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, Shore's large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past thirty years. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works presents a definitive collection of the landmark series, including over sixty previously unpublished images." "An essay by noted critic and curator Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and a conversation with Shore by fiction writer Lynne Tillman examine his methodology as they elucidate his roots in the pop and conceptual art movements of the late-sixties and early-seventies. The texts are illustrated with reproductions from Shore's earlier series American Surfaces and Amarillo: Tall in Texas."--BOOK JACKET.
This is not it
As Booklist says, "Tillman tackles issues on her terms, freshly reshaping traditional literary forms." 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. This is Not It is a collection of innovative and stand-alone writing that also engages and matches wits with 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' 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 bold, subtle, and riotous.
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.
On Kawara
For nearly 50 years Japanese-born artist On Kawara (29,771 days) devoted himself to a quiet practice of marking time, incrementally, via various methods and media. He is best known for a continuous series of monochromatic canvases, collectively titled Today, upon which each work's date of execution is painted in precise white script. This installation features three Date Paintings from the Today series (1966-2013) by On Kawara that together commemorate the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission in July 1969. Each large-scale canvas bears a date documenting the mission's launch (July 16, 1969), the landing of the lunar module (July 20), and man's first steps on the moon (July 21). The Moon Landing triptych is installed in a skylighted room designed in close collaboration with the artist and his estate.--Glenstone Museum website.
What would Lynne Tillman do?
A collection of essays and interviews covering a broad range of topics from art and literature to social problems and politics.
Blur of the otherworldly
Freedom
Paluten ist ein echter Abenteurer und kann schon gar nicht mehr zählen, wie oft er Freedom nun schon gerettet hat. Professor Entes Klonmaschine hat sich dabei in der Vergangenheit als besonders hilfreich erwiesen. Doch ausgerechnet die geht jetzt kaputt. Für die Reparatur benötigt er ein besonders seltenes Metall, welches es nur auf dem Gipfel des höchsten und gefährlichsten Berg Freedoms gibt: Mount Schmeverest. Paluten und Edgar machen sich natürlich sofort auf den Weg, um das seltene Metall zu besorgen, stoßen dabei allerdings auf unerwartete Gefahren und unvorhergesehene Hindernisse. Schaffen sie es, diesen Widrigkeiten zu trotzen und das Metall zu bekommen?