A former historian is spending time in a residential home – but is it an artist’s retreat, a spa, or a psychiatric hospital?

In hypnotic and digressive prose, Tillman’s narrator spins tales of her life while ruminating on her many and varied preoccupations: chair design, the Manson family, the Zulu alphabet, the death of a pet, family trauma, loneliness – and above all, skin and the meaning of ‘sensitivity’ in contemporary society. Meanwhile, these reveries and reminiscences are constantly interrupted by the presence of her fellow residents, each with their own obsessions and neuroses.

In this masterful novel, now available in the UK for the first time, Tillman fashions nothing less than a microcosm of troubled American democracy. American Genius, A Comedy reinvents the modernist novel for our distracted and hypermediated era – it is the tale of a consciousness that is expansive and exacting and utterly compelling.

Praise for American Genius, A Comedy

‘The narrative voice is manic, neurotic, self-generative, very smart, loopy, deeply vulnerable, closely (obsessively) observant, narcissistic, and eminently contemporary. It is also very funny. Flawed, beautiful, sacred, insane.’ – George Saunders

‘Lynne Tillman possesses the independence of spirit we see in the formal inventor, and the fearlessness of one who speaks out as she is moved to speak out.’ – Lydia Davis

‘Tillman gives us a mind hilariously on fire with compensatory distractions, bristling with facts that may not help at all.’ – Brian Dillon

‘A masterpiece.’ – Harry Mathews

Lynne Tillman writes novels, short stories, essays, and criticism. Her novel No Lease on Life was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, and her essay collection What Would Lynne Tillman Do? a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. She frequently writes fiction and essays for artists' books and museum catalogues, most recently for Raymond Pettibon, Joan Jonas, Cindy Sherman, and Carroll Dunham. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Grant for Arts Writing, and is a Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at the University of Albany. In 2021, a selected collection of Tillman's short stories will appear from Soft Skull Press, and a new collection of art essays published by David Zwirner Books. She lives in Manhattan with the bass player David Hofstra.