Freedom: The Happy Hypocrite

by Lynne Tillman (editor)

‘I think: Protect me from people who want to protect me; but more, save me from people who know what upsets others.’ - Lynne Tillman

This new issue of The Happy Hypocrite challenges the restraining notions found in art and writing about who and what can and cannot speak. What can and cannot be said or thought. In part a response to Kafka - to that which we don’t know has damaged us – freedom is presented as an important and urgent concept, and a complicated word, in which and beside which hypocrisy also resides. (Hypocrisy can be construed as a freedom). The Happy Hypocrite offers its pages to ingenious fictional, nonfictional, and visual responses to the various meanings of ‘freedom’.

There is a range of new contributions, from Gregg Bordowitz, Paul Chan, Gabriel Coxhead, Lydia Davis, Yasmine El Rashidi, Chloé Cooper Jones, James Jennings, Allison Katz, Robin Coste Lewis, the late Craig Owens, Sarah Resnick, Ranbir Singh Sidhu, Abdellah Taïa, an interview between Lynne Tillman and Thomas Keenan, a cover by Susan Hiller, and archival material from Paranoids Anonymous Newsletter.

96 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2013

About the author

Here’s an Author’s Bio. It could be written differently. I’ve written many for myself and read lots of other people’s. None is right or sufficient, each slants one way or the other. So, a kind of fiction – selection of events and facts.. So let me just say: I wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. That I actually do write stories and novels and essays, and that they get published, still astonishes me.

My news is that my 6th novel MEN AND APPARITIONS will appear in march 2018 from Soft Skull Press. It's my first novel in 12 years.

Each spring, I teach writing at University at Albany, in the English Dept., and in the fall, at The New School, in the Writing Dept.

I’ve lived with David Hofstra, a bass player, for many years. It makes a lot of sense to me that I live with a bass player, since time and rhythm are extremely important to my writing. He’s also a wonderful man.

As time goes by, my thoughts about writing change, how to write THIS, or why I do. There are no stable answers to a process that changes, and a life that does too. Writing, when I’m inhabiting its world, makes me happy, or less unhappy. I also feel engaged in and caught up in politics here, and in worlds farther away.

When I work inside the world in which I do make choices, I'm completely absorbed in what happens, in what can emerge. Writing is a beautiful, difficult relationship with what you know and don’t know, have or haven’t experienced, with grammar and syntax, with words, primarily, with ideas, and with everything else that’s been written.