What Would Lynne Tillman Do?

This is a showcase for Tillman's acuity, charm, vision, and intellectual breadth, What Would Lynne Tillman Do? offers an American mind interrogating our society's complacencies with grace and compassion.

Just as many of Tillman's short fictions have an essayistic quality about them, Tillman's essays often surge with narrative power, as she upends expectations, shifts tone, introduces characters, breaches limits of genre and category, reconfigures the world with the turn of a sentence. A long-time resident of New York, that city's sharp humor pervades these pages; Tillman's generosity and humanity are always there to soothe the wince of an acknowledged truth.

There are distinct streams of concern coursing through the seeming eclecticism of topics (Whitney Houston, interior design, Hilary Clinton, Jane Bowles, O.J. Simpson, Harry Mathews, the state of fiction, the state of her mind, the State of the Nation, but those consistent concerns, to which she returns like fingers to worry stones, are around what happens when men behave badly and when women behave too well.

What does Lynne Tillman do? She makes us better people for having read her.

Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other 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), 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 (1987). Someday This Will Be Funny (2012) is her most recent short story collection. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965-1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore (1995); Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. (1999), a cultural history of a literary landmark, and The Broad Picture, an essay collection. Colm Toibin lives in New York City.