Search results for ""Author Lynne Tillman""

From 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.

Read more less

A young woman drifts through a series of one night stands and truncated love affairs. Finding herself in a series of increasingly bizarre situations, she turns her curious and savage eye out on the foibles of the world around her. The men of this world evade and simper, they prey, and preen, and fall hopelessly in love. Through these snapshots we get a biting psychopathology, not just of masculinity in its various masks, but of sex and desire in the early 1970s.

Read more less

From the brilliantly original novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman comes Mothercare, an honest and beautifully written account of a sudden, drastically changed relationship to one's mother, and of the time and labor spent navigating the American healthcare system When a mother's unusual health condition, normal pressure hydrocephalus, renders her entirely dependent on you, your sisters, caregivers, and companions, the unthinkable becomes daily life. In Mothercare, Tillman describes doing what seems impossible: handling her mother as if she were a child and coping with a longtime ambivalence toward her. In Tillman's celebrated style and as a 'rich noticer of strange things' (Colm Toibin), she describes, without flinching, the unexpected, heartbreaking, and anxious eleven years of caring for a sick parent. Mothercare is both a cautionary tale and sympathetic guidance for anyone who suddenly becomes a caregiver. This story may be helpful, informative, consoling, or upsetting, but it never fails to underscore how impossible it is to get the job done completely right.

Read more less

Ezekiel Hooper Stark is a cultural anthropologist nudging forty. His interest is family snapshots. At home, he is absorbed by his own family's idiosyncrasies, perversities, and pathologies, until romantic betrayal sends him spiralling into a crisis. All the old models of masculinity are broken. Zeke embarks on a new project, studying the 'New Man', born under the sign of feminism. What do you expect from women? he asks his male subjects. What do you expect from yourself? Meanwhile, what will the reader make of Zeke is he enlightened, chauvinistic, or simply delusional? Kaleidoscopic and encyclopaedic, comic, tragic, and philosophical, Men and Apparitions showcases Lynne Tillman not only as a brilliantly original novelist but also as one of our most prominent contemporary thinkers on art, culture and the politics of gender.

Read more less

This book channels the rage, filth, anguish, and the bust-a-gut hilarity of pre-gentrified New York. The New York of Lynne Tillman's hilarious, audacious fourth novel is a boiling point of urban decay. The East Village streets are overrun with crooked cops, drug addicts, pimps, and prostitutes. Garbage piles up along the sidewalks amid the blaring soundtrack of car stereos. Confrontations are supercharged by the summer heat wave. This merciless noise has left Elizabeth Hall an insomniac. Junkies roam her building and overturn trashcans, but the landlord refuses to help clean or repair the decrepit conditions. Live-in boyfriend Roy is good-natured but too avoidant to soothe the sores of city life. Though Elizabeth fights for sanity in this apathetic metropolis, violent fantasies threaten to push her over the edge. In vivid detail, she begins to imagine murders: those of the "morons" she despises, and, most obsessively, her own. Frightening, hilarious, and wholly addictive, No Lease on Life is an avant-garde sucker-punch, a plea for humanity propelled by dark wit and unflinching honesty. Tillman's spare prose, frank, poignant and always illuminating, captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in America's toughest, hottest melting pot.

Read more less

This book collects images that New York–based artist Anne Collier (born 1970) originally presented as a slideshow of 80 35mm slides depicting found images of female subjects in the act of taking self-portraits. Dating from the 1970s to the early 2000s, these relics of the analog age were collected by Collier, each image discarded by its original owner but finding its way back to relevance in Collier’s work. The slideshow consists of amateur snapshots of women photographing themselves with film cameras prior to the advent of the digital "selfie." Instead of circulating on social media, these abandoned images once existed for a private audience. The resulting work is steeped in a deep sense of loneliness, illustrating photography’s contentious relationship to memory, loss and self-representation. The book represents a kind of sequel to Collier's 2017 book Women with Cameras (Anonymous).

Read more less

Following in the photographic lineage of Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, Justine Kurland’s work examines the story of America—and the idea of the American dream juxtaposed against the reality. Her deep interest in the road, the western frontier, escape, and ways of living outside mainstream values pervade this stunning and important body of work. Since 2004, Kurland and her young son, Casper, have traveled in their customized van, going south in the winter and north in the summer, her life as an artist and mother finely balanced between the need for routine and the desire for freedom and surprise. Casper’s interest —particularly in trains, and later in cars—and those he befriends along the way often determine Kurland’s subject matter. He appears at different ages in the work, against open vistas and among the subcultures of train-hoppers and drifters around them. Kurland’s vision is in equal parts raw and romantic, idyllic and dystopian. From highly symbolic pictures of trains moving across epic landscapes to allegorical depictions of mechanics and muscle cars, this book features the full scope of her road work—from her series This Train is Bound for Glory, to her most recent, Sincere Auto Care.

Read more less

Originally published in 1930 in an edition of 100 copies, Gertrude Stein’s Dix Portraits pairs her singular literary style with original lithographs by Pablo Picasso and other artists in Stein’s circle to create an exceptional artist’s book exploring written and visual portraiture. Written between 1913 and 1929, revolutionary years in art history, Dix Portraits conveys the deep human engagement between an artist and her subject. The artist’s book unites Stein’s ten portraits in prose with sketches by five artists: Pablo Picasso, Christian Bérard, Eugene Berman, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Kristians Tonny. Utilizing the interplay between word and image, Stein’s writing and the artists’ images provide nuance and depth, balancing humor and sincerity. With a new introduction by Lynne Tillman, Dix Portraits is an unforgettable artistic collaboration. The subjects represented include Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Erik Satie, Pavel Tchelitchew, Virgil Thomson, Christian Bérard, Bernard Faÿ, Kristians Tonny, Georges Hugnet, and Eugene Berman. Originally printed in an edition of 100 copies with the lithography, and now widely accessible for the first time, Dix Portraits captures Stein’s legacy as a champion of artists and a pioneer of creativity.

Read more less

Warhol's Factory as seen through the lens of a young Shore, providing an insider view of this extraordinary moment and place Stephen Shore was 17 years old when he began hanging out at The Factory - Andy Warhol's legendary studio in Manhattan. Between 1965 and 1967, Shore spent nearly every day there, taking pictures of its diverse cast of characters, from musicians to actors, artists to writers, and including Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed, and Nico - not to mention Warhol himself. This book presents a personal selection of photographs from Shore’s collection, providing an insider's view of this extraordinary moment and place, as seen through the eyes of one of photography's most beloved practitioners.

Read more less

Aura Rosenberg is concerned with the visible expression of sexual desire. Capturing the moment of orgasm on camera is usually reserved for the voyeur, the hidden witness. What Rosenberg has done is present herself as the public's witness via the camera, inviting a number of men into her studio to reenact the ecstasy of release, the moment when potency and vulnerability coexist. The result is a collection of extraordinary photographs that run the gamut of psychosexual expression. Whether her subjects were really giving their best shot or simply indulging in sublime fakery is just one of the very pertinent questions these pictures throw out. In acting out their most abandoned sexual and emotional moment before her lens, Rosenberg's subjects invite us to step beyond the traditional limits of voyeurism. These beautiful, curious and erotic images reserve the traditional male-on-female gaze and relieve it of some of its associations with misogyny and perversity. Writers Lynn Tillman and Gary Indiana reflect together on the experience of witnessing these photographs.

Read more less

The first comprehensive monograph on one of today’s most innovative and successful painters – made in close collaboration with the artist Defined by bold brushstrokes, a dynamic use of color and imaginative compositions, the paintings of Dana Schutz are panoramic expanses that offer visions of humanity in all its complex facets. Her deeply subjective approach, untethered from realism, translates into images that seem to exist in a place that transcends time while celebrating the intrinsic qualities of her medium of choice with freedom and intelligence. As the artist herself stated, ‘I’m interested in painting as an affective place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting.’ This first comprehensive monograph on her work was created in close collaboration with the artist and features a number of never-before-seen paintings and drawings.

Read more less

Throughout her career, photographer Laurie Simmons (1949) has staged scenes with dolls, dummies and occasionally people for her camera. In the fall of 2009, Simmons opened a new chapter to her work and ordered a customized, high-end “Love Doll” from Japan. The surrogate sex partner arrived in a crate, clothed in a transparent slip and accompanied by a separate box containing an engagement ring and genitalia. Simmons documented her photographic relationship with this human scale “girl,” depicting the lifelike, latex doll in an ongoing series of “actions”--each shown and titled chronologically from the day Simmons received the doll up to the present, describing the relationship she developed with her model. The first days of somewhat formal and shy poses give way to an ever-increasing familiarity and comfort level as time passes. A second doll arrived one year later. This new character, and the interaction between the two, reveal yet another dynamic in composition, both formal and psychological. In search of a stage for her Love Doll, Simmons turned to her own home, transforming it into an artfully staged, color coordinated, oversized dollhouse. A tale of disquieting adult fantasy, desire and regret, The Love Doll accompanies the complete photographic series with the artist’s diary entries and is printed on a special paper to evoke the touch of a Love Doll’s skin.

Read more less

A stunning, focused document of Nate Lowman’s work from the past four years. ---------- "Brewing the good, the bad, and the ugly of consumerist modern life in his masterful paintings, Lowman draws a portrait of the times that is equally mischievous and somber." - BOMB Magazine ----------- With an archive of source material amassed and processed over time, Lowman creates slippery, layered images that transform visual referents found in the news, media, and art history. In this volume, Lowman plays with cataclysmic imagery that probes the tensions between the everyday and the extreme, presence and absence, and violence and representation. In his vibrant paintings of digitally rendered hurricane imagery and crime scene photography cataloging the aftermath of the October 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, he considers the physicality of his medium in connection to the chaos of his subject matter. Spotlighting Lowman’s exhibitions at David Zwirner in London and New York along with other recent work, this monograph includes a text by Lynne Tillman that provides a unique perspective across all bodies of Lowman’s oeuvre. In an interview with Andrew Paul Woolbright for The Brooklyn Rail, Lowman discusses his engagement with representation and meaning, twentieth-century gestural and pop art, slow painting, and American violence.

Read more less