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Book Cover for: Thrilled to Death: Selected Stories, Lynne Tillman

Thrilled to Death: Selected Stories

Lynne Tillman

Critic Reviews

Great

Based on 7 reviews on

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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."

Book Details

  • Publisher: Soft Skull
  • Publish Date: Mar 25th, 2025
  • Pages: 320
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.74in - 5.83in - 1.26in - 1.00lb
  • EAN: 9781593767198
  • Categories: Short Stories (single author)WomenLiterary

About the Author

LYNNE TILLMAN's latest novel is Men and Apparitions. Her most recent book, MOTHERCARE, is an autobiographical essay on caregiving. Her essays and stories appear in Aperture, Bookforum, Frieze, N+1, Granta, Tank, and in art catalogs, artist books, and other magazines. Tillman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol Foundation arts Writers Grant, and The Academy of Arts and Letters Katherine Anne Porter Prize for contributions to literature. She lives in New York with the bassist David Hofstra.

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

"Of course, it would be this way, that the stories Lynne Tillman has bestowed all these years now record a kind of cyclone of sensations: the public and private affairs and catastrophes, the art and music we pulled close to us in order to survive, the city streets on fire with human noises and glances, the exhausting joy and delirious loneliness of living through it all. What a superb compendium of voices she's given us." --Jonathan Lethem

"There's a lot of sex in a lot of places in Lynne Tillman's suggestive stories: Someone will love you. Dirty dishes rebuke. Mother knits. Lily Lee didn't leave Frank at the altar. Tillman's way with words--unexpected but exact--is stupendous. Totally stupendous." --Nell Painter, author of Old in Art School and I Just Keep Talking