This is not it
Subtitle: stories
By: Lynne Tillman.
Publisher: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers; Charles Rivers Publishing Co.
Published: 2002
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 287
Description: 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.
Table of contents: title: Come and go; title: Madame Realism; title: To find words; title: TV tales; title: Living with contradictions; title: Madame Realism : a fairy tale; title: Phantoms; title: Pleasure isn't a pretty picture; title: A picture of time; title: Ode to le pantomane; title: Lust for loss; title: This is not it; title: Flowers; title: Madame Realism lies here; title: Snow-job; title: Wild life; title: Dead sleep; title: Madame Realism looks for relief; title: Hold me; title: The lost city of words; title: Madame Realism's torch song; title: The undiagnosed; title: Thrilled to death.