LYNNE TILLMAN
Writing Fellow for the Writers Institute
PREVIOUS VISITS:
NYS Writers Institute Reading - March 28, 2007
7:00 p.m. University Art Museum
The event is cosponsored by the University Art Museum as part of its Spring 2007 Art and Culture Talks (ACT), in conjunction with "Mr. President," (January 18 - April 1, 2007) an exhibition of non-traditional portraits of U.S. presidents. Tillman has written an essay for the Art Museum's "Mr. President" exhibit catalogue. The piece is in the style of her "Madame Realism" columns, which are well-known in the art world having appeared in the journal "Art in America" since 1986.
NYS Writers Institute Reading - November 19, 2002
4:15 p.m. Informal Seminar | East Seminar Room, New Library
8:00 p.m. Reading | Recital Hall, PAC
Lynne Tillman is a fiction writer, essayist, art critic, and educator and is an Associate Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at UAlbany.
"an acupuncturist" who "knows the precise points into which to sink her delicate probes." - novelist Edmund White
"so striking and original it transforms the way you see the world, the way you think about and interact with your surroundings." - Los Angeles Reader
Her latest novel, "American Genius, A Comedy" (2006), dismantles American myths, past and present, through the fevered thoughts of an unnamed woman who suffers from dermatographia, a skin condition in which the lightest touch leaves visible lines, like writing on paper. "Publishers Weekly" said, "An often dazzling, totally disorienting interior riff, Tillman's fifth novel [digresses] with authority on loneliness, denim, Eames chairs, the history of silk, the vicissitudes of friendship, Puritanism, the blissfulness of sleep and the pleasures of 100% cotton socks.... this loopy trip through a meandering, fretful mind proves worthwhile." The "Los Angeles Times" reviewer said that the narrator's "thoughts are frequently difficult.... Yet they are always compelling. They map a path of survival through thickets real and imagined."
Tillman is also the author of "This Is Not It" (2002), a series of short stories written in collaboration with visual artists. "Publishers Weekly" said, "A kind of career retrospective for Tillman, this collection of formally innovative stories from the last 20 years follows a cast of artists and grunts from a vanishing New York City bohemia.... [Readers] will enjoy her nuanced interior monologues and amusing explorations of how best to reproduce human consciousness on paper."
"an illuminated manuscript as precise and clear as it is associative and mysterious, as funny as it is grave, as merciless as it is profoundly compassionate." - Tony Kushner
Tillman's previous novel, "No Lease on Life" (1998), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named a "New York Times" Notable Book. The novel recounts one oppressively hot day in the life of a woman living in New York City's East Village. Her other novels include "Haunted Houses" (1987), "Motion Sickness" (1991), and "Cast in Doubt" (1992). She is also the author of "Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co." (1999). Featuring a preface by Woody Allen, "Bookstore" is the nonfiction account of a beloved literary landmark on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Two essay collections include "The Broad Picture" (1997) and "Absence Makes the Heart" (1990). She is also the author of the pictorial history, "The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965-67 (1994), with photographs by Stephen Shore.
Other books by Lynne Tillman
Previous Articles:
Writers Online Magazine Article
Guggenheim Fellowship
For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.