Description
Book SynopsisFrom the author of Weird Fucks, a witty, bleak, and outrageous account of American girlhood. Haunted Houses is the story of three young women. Jane’s occasionally violent father reads her the Gettysburg Address at bedtimes, while Emily’s parents are FDR Democrats who only privately concede she may be normal. Grace believes her dolls come alive at night and talk against her, and has a mother who likes animals more than people. Tillman charts the girls’ unsteady drift into womanhood, revealing the multiple forms of inheritance – family, gender, culture – that a girl must swallow or rebel against. Haunted Houses is about the past within the present, the inescapability of private memory and public history. In prose that is uncanny and precise, it showcases Lynne Tillman at her boldest and most trenchant.
Trade Review'Lynne Tillman's Haunted Houses is as vivid as it is compelling. Events and details arrest your reading on every page, conjuring experience in all its shades of feeling. Haunted Houses is a modern classic, so sharp, so clever, so rich in acuity and open to witness. For me the book ranks alongside Truman Capote's writing at its best – that lucid foraging for motive, that astute understanding of atmosphere and place. And it's like an album that everyone should have in their collection – one of those records they say "launched a thousand bands". That Tillman is a major writer, and has been for decades, is so obvious.' Michael Bracewell; 'Kathy Acker once said that Tillman’s extraordinary and unprecedented novel Haunted Houses was "a building made of sentences." Thirty five years on, it reads as a vivid, contemporary telling of the complicated lives of three young American women – a novel that laid the living foundation for a whole generation of writers.' Stephanie LaCava; 'Tillman’s exacting and hyperreal language – clean, controlled, sharply defined – is the equivalent of the glass case in novel form. She traces the shape of each of these characters' lives with the hard edges of words, etching them onto the page.' Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi; 'A true force in American literature.' George Saunders; 'A new thought in every sentence.' Lydia Davis
