Thrilled to Death
Selected Stories
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
From award-winning novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman, Thrilled to Death is a collection of selected stories across the career of America’s most audacious writer
Among the vanguard of American literary writers, Lynne Tillman’s work has defied categorization throughout her legendary career—a singular body of work that both redefined and reimagined the short story form entirely.
Curated by the author, Thrilled to Death is the definitive entry point for both established fans and new readers alike. These selected stories collect a bold, playful, and eclectic ensemble of Tillman’s Borgesian fictions that span decades and traverse themes of sex, death, memory, and anxiety.
With argumentative wit, Tillman’s meditations and reflections on art, politics, and culture are animated by deliciously paradoxical characters who desire and fret in turn, and who are imbued with searing intelligence and dolorous ambivalence. Describing Tillman's writing, Colm Tóibín says: “Her style has both tone and undertone; it attempts to register the impossibility of saying very much, but it insists on the right to say a little. So what is essential is the voice itself, its ways of knowing and unknowing.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This shimmering, career-spanning collection captures Tillman (No Lease on Life) at her most beguiling, playful, and inventive. In "Come and Go," three characters collide according to the whims of the narrator ("I have my reasons"). The ingenue at the center of "Coming of Age in Xania" blurs her description of the surreal film she's cast in with an account of drifting between two lovers, while the narrator of "Aka Mergatroyde," a fictional stand-in for the author, claims the name Lynne Tillman is a pseudonym and that she's now going to tell the true story of her Mergatroyde family, beginning with an ancestor's violent death in Scotland. In "Dead Talk," actor Norma Jean Baker tells her story from the perspective of her Marilyn Monroe persona, while in "The Undiagnosed," the narrator meets filmmaker Clint Eastwood at a party and they talk about their fathers. The title entry returns to the conceit of "Come and Go," following several strangers as they wander a carnival. Tillman is infinitely clever and a master at concision, able to unspool both ordinary and epic tragedies in just a few pages. This is Tillman's best book yet.
