This Is Not It

by Lynne Tillman

In This Is Not It, Lynne Tillman's collection of 20 years' worth of important and compelling short stories and novellas, the protagonists seduce you into their lives and thoughts. Engaging, funny, elegant and ironic, Tillman takes the reader to new heights of wit and meaning through staccato phrases, grammatical twists and sensuous language. Familiar worlds of honesty, deceit, dark humor, pleasure, pain, confusion, dependence, love and lust each play decisive roles in her believable fictions. In "Come and Go," three characters and an author collide. In "Pleasure Isn't a Pretty Picture," the reader is treated to a he/she meditation on the one-night stand. And "Dead Sleep" is truly an insomniac's worst nightmare. A twin act on a double bill, This Is Not It is a collection of innovative and stand-alone writing that also engages and matches wits with the some of the best contemporary work by Kiki Smith, Jane Dickson, Jessica Stockholder, Diller & Scofidio, Laura Letinsky, Peter Dreher, Roni Horn, Stephen Ellis, Juan Munoz, Vik Muniz, Silvia Kolbowski, Jeff Koons, James Welling, Aura Rosenberg, Barbara Ess, Barbara Kruger, Dolores Marat, Haim Steinbach, Gary Schneider, Marco Breuer, Stephen Prina and Linder Sterling. Since 1982, acclaimed novelist Tillman has created these unique narratives that are a parallel universe to the contemporary art world. Maybe they're analogues or dialogues, maybe fictions inspired by art, maybe reflections, or meditations--but whatever they're called, like Borges's fictions, they are their own worlds, too. Tillman has marked out terrain of her own, which this collection celebrates. Full of life and art, This Is Not It is illuminating, bold, subtle and riotous.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

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.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classy and thought-provoking stories from the Manhattan-based multimedia artist.

Tillman has a distinctive approach to storytelling. She approaches the page like an artist approaches her canvas, painting vivid and surreal pictures of strange, hyperreal worlds. "Madame Realism" is a recurring character whose presence lends the book a metaphysical depth, an intellectual peculiarity.

It does suffer from its unrelentingly abstract approach, but the variety of technical display is kept impressively fresh and original throughout. Tillman avoids pretension because her characters glow the from page (whether they want to or not). She is a skilled portrait artist lurking beneath a Surrealist mask.

Also contains glorious artwork and illustrations.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bold and engaging ... probing and daring, Tillman moves beyond expectancy, to formulate an honest look into how we collect our thoughts, our selves, as well as how we loose track of them ... with fluid and brilliant flashes of wit, charm, and insight throughout, it's worth a good go.

[Sara Luz · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a writer and visual artist, I imagine Lynne Tillman approaching and retreating from the text as canvas, putting on a smear of story and then ruminating on what has been done. She consistently questions herself in the role of a writer, particularly in the Paige stories, when "Paige on the page" struggles to find her writing voice and her place in the word, I almost wrote world. I enjoyed the travel between levels of narrative awareness Tillman flows through; writer as creator, writer as narrator, character, mark maker and arranger.

[Kirsten · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is not...a lot of things. I didn't finish this collection. Pretentious & vapid. Yawn.

[travis · Rating 1 out of 5]

i really thought this was gonna be cool. it wasn't. it made me wanna eat my eyeballs. after a while, even the art isn't that interesting. lame.

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

faves are "Living With Contradictions" and "Lust For Loss"