This Is Not It: Stories by Lynne Tillman - Hardcover

Tillman, Lynne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1891024469 ISBN 13: 9781891024467

Publisher: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Lynne Tillman is the author of the novels Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; and No Lease on Life, a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and the story collections Absence Makes the Heart and The Madame Realism Complex. Her non-fiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965-1967 and The Broad Picture. Tillman's fiction is anthologized in, among others, The New Gothic, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Literature, The Time Out Book of New York Stories, and High Risk. She writes regularly on art, books, and culture and contributes frequently to artists' books and museum catalogues. She lives in New York.

From Publishers Weekly

A kind of career retrospective for Tillman (No Lease on Life), this collection of formally innovative stories from the last 20 years (most of them previously published) follows a cast of artists and grunts from a vanishing New York City bohemia. Or at least those are the characters that one can identify-Tillman uses stylized, anonymous narrators in some of her more minimalist tales. In "Pleasure Isn't a Pretty Picture," a summary of a sexual encounter, Tillman pulls apart the male and female parts of the dialogue and lists them as two different scripts ("She said: That's all right. She said: Are you crying? She said: Again. She said: Almost. She said: You tell that to all the girls"). "Come and Go" shifts deftly among the perspectives of three different characters who pass through the same hospital waiting room: a heroin addict, a psychic social worker with a twisted ankle and a man waiting to hear whether he has cancer. The final section of the story is told from the perspective of the writer who has created these three. Many of the stories are inspired by, or complement works of, contemporary art, and each one has its own title page with a full-color painting or photograph by such artists as Kiki Smith and Jeff Koons. Though some readers may not have the patience for her experimental story structures, others will enjoy her nuanced interior monologues and amusing explorations of how best to reproduce human consciousness on paper.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1891024469
• ISBN 13: 9781891024467
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256