Published in 2002
256 pages
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.
What is this book about?
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.
