No Lease on Life (23 page)

—
Boston Phoenix

“A private eye in the public sphere, [Tillman] refuses no assignment and distils the finest wit, intelligence and hard evidence from some of the world’s most transient artifacts and allegories. This is a truly memorable book.”

—
Andrew Ross

The stories in
Someday This Will Be Funny
marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators—by turn infamous and nameless—shift within their own skin, struggling to unknot reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus, then cool, twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle, quotation, and haiku bounce between lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillman’s preferred subject: the unsettled mind. Collectively, these stories own a conscience shaped by oaths made and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by love’s shifting chartreuse. They traffic in the quiet images of personal history, each one a flickering sacrament in danger of being swallowed up by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking tickets shoved in the glove compartment, a little black book hidden from a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planter stuffed with flowers to keep out the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned with candor and animated by fits of wordplay and invention—stories that affirm Tillman’s unshakable talent for wedding the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence, defying genre and defining experimental short fiction.

“Both entertaining and unnerving… If fiction is a mirror that shows the life and slime of our times, then this writer has her finger on the wavering pulse of our century at its closing.”

—
Time Out
on
No Lease on Life

“Lynne Tillman has always been a hero of mine—not because I ‘admire’ her writing, (although I do, very, very much), but because I feel it. Imagine driving alone at night. You turn on the radio and hear a song that seems to say it all. That’s how I feel…”

—
Jonathan Safran Foer

“One of America’s most challenging and adventurous writers.”

—
Guardian

“Like an acupuncturist, Lynne Tillman knows the precise points in which to sink her delicate probes. One of the biggest problems in composing fiction is understanding what to leave out; no one is more severe, more elegant, more shocking in her reticences than Tillman.”

—
Edmund White

“Anything I’ve read by Tillman I’ve devoured.”

—
Anne K. Yoder
,
The Millions

“If I needed to name a book that is maybe the most overlooked important piece of fiction in not only the 00s, but in the last 50 years, [
American Genius, A Comedy
] might be the one. I could read this back to back to back for years.”

—
Blake Butler
,
HTML Giant