Lynne Tillman in conversation with Nicole Flattery
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We are delighted to welcome novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman who will be in conversation with Nicole Flattery at Books Upstairs on Friday 11 October. Lynne and Nicole will be discussing Lynne’s novel American Genius, A Comedy, which has just been published by Peninsula Press, making it available in this part of the world for the first time. Admission to this event is free, but booking is essential.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A former historian is spending time in a residential home – but is it an artist’s retreat, a spa, or a psychiatric hospital?
In hypnotic and digressive prose, Tillman’s narrator spins tales of her life while ruminating on her many and varied preoccupations: chair design, the Manson family, the Zulu alphabet, the death of a pet, family trauma, loneliness – and above all, skin and the meaning of ‘sensitivity’ in contemporary society. Meanwhile, these reveries and reminiscences are constantly interrupted by the presence of her fellow residents, each with their own obsessions and neuroses.
In this masterful novel, Tillman fashions nothing less than a microcosm of troubled American democracy. American Genius, A Comedy reinvents the modernist novel for our distracted and hypermediated era – it is the tale of a consciousness that is expansive and exacting and utterly compelling.
PRAISE FOR AMERICAN GENIUS, A COMEDY:
‘The narrative voice is manic, neurotic, self-generative, very smart, loopy, deeply vulnerable, closely (obsessively) observant, narcissistic, and eminently contemporary. It is also very funny. Flawed, beautiful, sacred, insane.’ – George Saunders
‘Lynne Tillman possesses the independence of spirit we see in the formal inventor, and the fearlessness of one who speaks out as she is moved to speak out.’ – Lydia Davis
‘Tillman gives us a mind hilariously on fire with compensatory distractions, with facts that may not help at all.’ – Brian Dillon
‘A masterpiece.’ – Harry Mathews
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS:
LYNNE TILLMAN is a novelist, and cultural critic, twice finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Tillman is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writing Fellowship.
NICOLE FLATTERY is the author of the novel Nothing Special and the short story collection Show Them A Good Time. She has won an An Post Irish Book Award, the Kate O’Brien Prize, the London Magazine Prize for Debut Fiction, and the White Review Short Story Prize.
