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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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MEN AND APPARITIONS

Lynne Tillman

From one of America's most prominent contemporary thinkers on art, culture, and society, comes a long anticipated original novel.
Ezekiel Hooper Stark is a cultural anthropologist, an ethnographer of family photographs, a wry speculator about images. From childhood, his own family's idiosyncrasies, perversities, and pathologies propel Zeke, until love lost sends him spiraling out of control in Europe. Back in the U.S.A., he finds unexpected solace in the image of a notable nineteenth-century relative, Clover Hooper Adams. Zeke embarks on a project, MEN IN QUOTES, focusing his anthropological lens on his own kind: the "New Man," born under the sign of feminism. All the old models of masculinity are broken. How are you different from your father? Zeke asks his male subjects. What do you expect from women? What does Zeke expect from himself? And what will the reader expect of Zeke? - is he a Don Quixote, Holden Caulfield, Underground Man, or Stranger?

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Cast in Doubt; Motion Sickness; and Haunted Houses. Her nonfiction works
include Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeanette Watson and Books & Co. and The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965-1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore. Her most recent short story collections are The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories and Someday This Will Be Funny, and her most recent essay collection, What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. She is Professor/Writer-in- Residence in the Department of English at the University of Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Arts' Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program.
Available products
Book

Published 2018-03-13 by Soft Skull Press

Book

Published 2018-03-13 by Soft Skull Press

Comments

Gorgeously at ease and technically virtuosic . . . Tillman is simply a terrific prose stylist whose work should have wide appeal.

Lynne Tillman has always been a hero of mine - not because I 'admire' her writing, (although I do, very, very much), but because I feel it. Imagine driving alone at night. You turn on the radio and hear a song that seems to say it all. That's how I feel.

MEN AND APPARITIONS is shortlisted for The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2021 Read more...

A profoundly wise and remarkably supple novel from an outstanding writer.

With callouts to a mind-revving roster of photographers, writers, filmmakers, intellectuals, and media magnets, erudite, discerning, and ever-daring Tillman has forged a mischievous conflation of criticism and fiction. Incantatory, maddening, brilliant, zestful, compassionate, and timely, Tillman's portrait of a floundering academic trying to make sense of a digitized world of churning, contradictory messages reveals the perpetual interplay between past and present, the personal and the cultural, image and life.

Like an acupuncturist, Lynne Tillman knows the precise points in which to sink her delicate probes. One of the biggest problems in composing fiction is understanding what to leave out; no one is more severe, more elegant, more shocking in her reticences than Tillman.

"You could say, This is a funny time. You could, but then you wouldn't be me." This remark from the narrator of Lynne Tillman's intricate new novel, "Men and Apparitions," exemplifies the book's swirl of humor and horror, evasion and candor....The New Man, Zeke calls this type his type and Tillman's novel is a patient, insistent exploration of what it means to live inside such a mind... Read more...

link to the graphic on Twitter which includes a lovely review of the book: "A wry, searching commentary on our contemporary world scattered across a 38-year-old's exposition of his own masculinity. ... Tillman asks some of the most vital questions there are to ask about our current moment: what exists beyond normative social roles?... Read more...