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    American Genius: A Comedy
    Unavailable
    American Genius: A Comedy
    Unavailable
    American Genius: A Comedy
    Ebook405 pages5 hours

    American Genius: A Comedy

    By Lynne Tillman and Lucy Ives

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

  • Soft Skull Press is reissuing Tillman's bold and unmatched novel, American Genius (2006), the celebrated book that truly gave rise to the "Cult of Lynne Tillman"
  • In March 2018, Tillman published her first novel in twelve years, the critically acclaimed Men and Apparitions, providing new and enthusiastic readers for her other works, including American Genius.
  • The reissue will include an introduction by Lucy Ives, whose writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The Baffler, Frieze, Lapham’s Quarterly, and Vogue, among other publications. Her novel Loudermilk is forthcoming from Soft Skull in Spring 2019.
  • American Genius was timely when first released in 2006, but with issues like sensitivity in American culture and obsessive skin-care routines, the book feels particularly relevant to to audiences today
  • Lynne Tillman is twice a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (Criticism and Fiction) and has been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, BOMB Magazine, and more
  • A native of New York City and a passionate participant in the city's art, literary, and cultural communities, Tillman will be available for events and conversations surrounding the reissue
  • Soft Skull, under the editorial leadership of Yuka Igarashi, is committed to reissuing key titles from the backlist to introduce them to new readerships. From Maggie Nelson's Something Bright, Then Holes to Jillian Weise's The Amputee's Guide to Sex, Alain Manbankou's Broken Glass and now American Genius, these reissues have an iconic trade paper original packaging and are intended to be provocative and accessible.
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSoft Skull Press
    Release dateFeb 1, 2019
    ISBN9781593763176
    Unavailable
    American Genius: A Comedy

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    Reviews for American Genius

    3.5/5

    14 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This "novel" took me an inordinate amount of time to read. And it's only 292 pages in length! I kept picking it up and putting it down. I read one big chunk on a flight from Tucson to Oakland, however, which served to solidify this dense and almost maddeningly recursive anti-narrative for me. A nouveau stream-of-consciousness novel a la 21st century Virginia Woolf perhaps. The narrator, Helen, a middle-aged woman with extremely sensitive skin and subject to a "nonorganic pressure on the heart" is a disassembler of objects, memories, ideas, theories and personalities who has taken up temporary residence at a kind of mental-health rest home or personal growth institute. She introduces herself as "a recorder and collector, a listmaker, I studied history, philosophy, literature and have taught American history, but dissuaded from the academic life after receiving a Ph.D., or unsuited for its piquant rigors, even though well equipped to be an historian, since I could read something and remember it, I subsequently trained as an object maker and designer, while haphazardly pursuing odd jobs. I also wait." An intellectual obsessive, she collects facts about just about everything imaginable, examines them as if under a microscope and then makes paratactic leaps from subject to subject, obsession to obsession, childhood memory to excruciatingly detailed observation of the goings on of the other residents. And the other residents are a decidedly colorful bunch: the Count, Contessa AKA Violet, the Magician, the demanding man, the balding man, the Turkish poet, the disconsolate woman, the mathematician Spike, etc. Helen notes that "many of the residents here are not equipped for life as it is commonly regulated but they struggle on." Other recurring characters in Helen's mental cabinet of curiosities are her dead father, her out-of-touch brother, her senile mother, various cats and a dog, her Polish esthetician, various chairs both poorly and well-designed and the imprisoned Leslie Van Houten. Above all else, however, American Genius is about time, about the body, the mind and mortality. Tillman's prose throughout is nothing but surprising; her sentences invite delectation. This is a book for readers who delight in the journey without concern for the destination.
    • 3/5
      American Genius: a Comedy falls into the category of post-modern self-referential novels a la Wittgenstein's Mistress, Wittgenstein's Nephew, and perhaps Jaeggy's Sweet Days of Discipline. All of these present a first person narrative: an isolated individual enjoys the dubious privilege of existing in an institution that allows them time to think--that is, time to follow a thought at leisure--with very minimal outside interference. (Mann's Magic Mountain also partially satisfies this criteria--as generally do most novels set in sanatoriums). On the whole, this genre can be differentiated by the specificity of the protagonist’s “triggers,” or “tics,” and the extent to which they are artfully woven into their personal, stream of consciousness narrative. Our protagonist, Helen, has her own peculiar idiosyncratic preoccupations: they center around skin conditions, ergonomic mid-century modern chairs, animals her parents killed, American History, Puritanism, fabric, memory (and its loss), time, sexuality, etc., to name but a few. She has a neurotic’s sense of humor; she is tactilely & socially sensitive; for each described instance, she exhaustively enumerates the psychology which might explain a particular human behavior. If the specific topics mentioned are not of interest to you, then I would advise skipping this book. If you have any interest in contemplating (or ruminating on) the complexity of superficiality, or the profundity of the phrase “skin-deep,” then this is the book for you.
    • 1/5
      I bravely ventured 30 pages into this book before I gave up. If you enjoy sophomoric stream of consciousness writing, then this is your book.