A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Kirkus Reviews, A Best Fiction Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Editors’ Pick
Vulture, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
“Lynne Tillman is an emissary from a vanishing literary culture . . . Tillman writes for grown-ups, but the kind who are constantly tending to their inner children . . . In an era of truncated attention spans, her short stories, some verging on micro, seem newly with-it. Her one-liners can do more than certain entire volumes.” —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times
“A good book of selected stories should feel like a cabinet of wonders and curiosities, where you get to experience the writer’s full range of interests and obsessions: quirky one-offs and virtuosic pieces that capture a whole world in a few pages. Thrilled to Death has all those qualities.” —Jess Row, The Washington Post
“[Tillman] writes fiction that’s formally innovative but unpretentious, inherently political, and unmistakably of our time.” —Emma Alpern, A Vulture Most Anticipated Book of the Year
“The way Tillman captures fear and news as intertwined—as terrifying and electrifying, a pulse underlying everything—feels contemporary . . . Humor, jabs and japes, lists, puns, and a deadpan near-flatness; detail is kept spare and sparse. I adore her short work—fiction, essays, I don’t discriminate. They’re not bound to some puritanical ideas of plot or progress. They don’t work toward easy resolution. Yet in them all, she is saying something larger about a moment—and while she has been writing since the 1980s, that moment is always now.” —Jennifer Kabat, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Tillman is an artist who knows how to handle an ending; these stories are pressurized like diamonds and never fail to stick the landing. Aphoristic, associative, and seemingly charged by the kind of self-understanding that can only be achieved by decades of psychoanalysis . . . Tillman is one of the last of her kind—this collection contains the lawlessness of stylists like Barry Hannah and Diane Williams and the savage, tender intelligence of critics like Susan Sontag and Gary Indiana. Thrilled is a definitive and essential retrospective.” —Anika Jade Levy, The Whitney Review
“In a world constructed of images, where the identity of being a creative lacks meaning and gets subsumed into a bottomless pit of Instagram bios and dormant Substack intro posts, [Tillman] is one of the best models we have for working writers . . . Lucky for us, Tillman is everywhere.” —Greta Rainbow, Family Style
“[A] shifting narration and a slippery sense of reality and genre is characteristic of the book . . . it feels, fundamentally, of and about city life, in the way Mrs. Dalloway does. The book, like the city, is a place where innumerable human consciousnesses (fictional as they are, Tillman’s characters have an irrepressible humanity) stream past each other and stack on top of one another. As laughing and crying, fiction and reality give way to one another, so do dream worlds and conscious ones . . . In Tillman’s stories, dreams and fantasies are recounted again and again.” —Meghan Racklin, The Brooklyn Rail
“Tillman is also an extraordinarily acute essayist and memoirist . . . as well as a novelist of wild formal and argumentative ambition. But her stories seem to best foreground certain aspects of her writing: a determined oddity of address to the reader, a playful but pitiless application of ideas, and a comedy that might be most astringent over the space and time of this shorter form . . . An incomparable writer about the entanglements of kinship and romance, these unnatural states traversed by culture and the intrusion of mundanity . . . Among the joys of Tillman’s work: the fact we can never decide or choose between her teeming ideas or knowing citations, her formal adventures, and an emotional depth that is unafraid to approach something like wisdom.” —Brian Dillon, 4Columns
“Lynne Tillman is an author who refreshingly resists our national logic of instant gratification . . . For all its experimentations and deconstructions, the book reveals that Tillman has in fact been offering lessons in narrative survival all along . . . Under Tillman’s spell, it often feels—hilariously, restoratively, unnervingly—as if anything could happen at any time . . . Tillman’s funhouse will warp your reflection, rearrange your brain. She’ll send you home disoriented, dizzy, and ultimately free.” —Jessi Jezewska Stevens, Bookforum
“Those unfamiliar with Tillman’s four decade career might start with ‘Playing Hurt,’ a story about marriage that emphasizes interiority, then dive into the language-driven ‘Future Prosthetic @?’ to get a sense of how she refuses to limit her approach to narrative. Tillman says she’s presented these stories in a kind of thematic order, but jumping around is a fine way to enjoy—and constantly be surprised by—Tillman’s range.” —Judith Mitchell, Literary Hub
“The tonal and formal variation in Thrilled to Death is astonishing: With Postmodern inventiveness, Tillman’s collection teems with wit, prescient social critique, and a voice that abstracts itself.” —Electric Literature
“Tillman is one of my favorite writers, mostly for the ways her stories animate a social milieu—usually some iteration of East Village bohemians—and commit to big ideas, be they about art or literature or self-invention. This career-spanning collection showcases her at her best and wittiest.” —David Varno, A Publishers Weekly Editors’ Pick
“This shimmering, career-spanning collection captures Tillman at her most beguiling, playful, and inventive . . . Tillman is infinitely playful 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.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Tillman delights in exploring the limits of what’s possible within the short story form. The answer, it appears, is absolutely anything. A rich selection of stories spanning Tillman’s singular career.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“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
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