Description:
Channeling the rage, filth, anguish, and the bust-a-gut hilarity of pre-gentrified New York, Tillman captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in America's toughest, hottest melting pot.
Brief description: Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels are Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; American Genius, A Comedy, and Men and Apparitions. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965-1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore; Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.; and What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at The University of Albany, and lives in New York with bass player David Hofstra.
Review Quotes:
Praise for No Lease on Life
"Confirms and enhances her reputation as one of America's most challenging and adventurous writers." - Guardian
"No Lease on Life hould be awarded a special Pulitzer for the most perfect use of the word "moron" in the history of the American novel." - Fran Lebowitz
"As energetic and raunchy as a New York street." - San Francisco Chronicle
"[Elizabeth] neither recoils nor romanticizes . . . . She's a character who stays with you after you put the book down-a creature of occasional dark impulses, intermittent grumpiness and perennial willingness to pull up her socks and deal." - David Gates, New York Times Book Review
"A book anyone concerned with urban life, women, or American culture, as it stumbles into the 21st century, must read."-Sapphire
"Exquisite... To encounter a writer of Tillman's acute intelligence writing as well as this is a cause for real celebration." Independent (UK)
"Tillman describes much of the wearing, wearying routine of the city's daily life -- all that garbage, all those druggies and creeps and whores we've met in a million Letterman one-liners jammed into a scrawny crevice of land while the rest of America's so huge and airy and free. But Tillman's book is utopian precisely because it takes those things into account; because its heroine fantasizes about murdering all 'the morons' not out of hate, 'but dignity and a social space, a civil space, actually civilian space.' . . . [Tillman] sprinkles the text with dozens and dozens of jokes . . . . Who can't relate? Isn't every public-transportation-riding, rent-paying, law-abiding urban dweller about two or three knock-knock jokes away from homicide?" - Sarah Vowell, Salon
"Richly surreal . . . yet darkly humorous . . .Tillman demonstrates her wit, superb observational skill, realism of representation, and verbal eloquence... No Lease on Life is a meditation on the realness and the ridiculousness of daily living. Yet again, Tillman tackles issues on her terms, freshly reshaping traditional literary forms." -Donna Seaman, Booklist
"We first meet Elizabeth sitting at the window of her East Village apartment at 5 a.m. spinning gruesome revenge fantasies about the noisy hoodlums in the street . . . this novel [is] graced by flashes of bilious wit, a series of funny, inconsequential jokes and an appealingly loopy milieu." - Publishers Weekly
"A terribly up-close and personal examination of urban angst and fury. It is also a funny, frightening, and utterly brilliant tour de force." - Bay Area Reporter
"Darkly humorous . . . [the] New York that one doesn't see on Seinfeld." - Library Journal
"In a society that increasingly deals with the unbearable by cleaning 'it' up, by sweeping the streets and parks of the homeless and addicted, and/or stashing 'it' away (in ghettos, prisons, etc.), No Lease on Life provides a straight-on view and acknowledgment of the unbearable, if not an acceptance. What Elizabeth collects keeps her from sleeping, drives her to thoughts of murder, and yet 'she [has] to be open ... like a window ... sometimes transparent, usually paradoxical, and always open to tragicomic views of life.'" - Elisabeth Sheffield, Review of Contemporary Fiction