Lynne Tillman is an emissary from a vanishing literary culture ... Tillman’s style is spare and spiky ... In an era of truncated attention spans, her short stories, some verging on micro, seem newly with-it. Her one-liners can do more than certain entire volumes.
The pieces...tend to begin abruptly and end in a screeching halt, where you stumble out, a little dizzy, wondering what just happened ... Tillman’s stories are told. They’re dominated by the narrator’s insistent voice, which sometimes feels like all it needs is a premise and a few accompanying details ... These short-short stories don’t leave you much time to catch your breath ... A good book of selected stories should feel like a cabinet of wonders and curiosities, where you get to experience the writer’s full range of interests and obsessions: quirky one-offs and virtuosic pieces that capture a whole world in a few pages. Thrilled to Death has all those qualities.
Amid the twisted humor of Lynne Tillman’s short stories, an incomparable chronicling of human relations ... But her stories seem to best foreground certain aspects of her writing: a determined oddity of address to the reader, a playful but pitiless application of ideas, and a comedy that might be most astringent over the space and time of this shorter form ... She is an incomparable writer about the entanglements of kinship and romance, these unnatural states traversed by culture and the intrusion of mundanity ... Among the joys of Tillman’s work: the fact we can never decide or choose between her teeming ideas or knowing citations, her formal adventures, and an emotional depth that is unafraid to approach something like wisdom.
An author who refreshingly resists our national logic of instant gratification ... In a Tillman story, everything can come together in the final line, and often does ... As usual, Tillman is correct ... Today, Tillman’s persistent openness to failure—her embrace of chatty tangents over 'progress'—is especially notable for never dissipating into mere anxiety or ennui ... For all its experimentations and deconstructions, the book reveals that Tillman has in fact been offering lessons in narrative survival all along ... Tillman’s restless cul-de-sacs, reversals, and restarts are vital exercises in delay, methods for staving off premature ends ... Tillman’s unconventional strategies for keeping the narrative in motion are myriad and carnivalesque ... Under Tillman’s spell, it often feels—hilariously, restoratively, unnervingly—as if anything could happen at any time ... Tillman is a skilled comic, with an especially deft touch for skewering gender norms. She is also endlessly quotable, packing in a surplus of simple beauty...and pure wisecrack-ery...at the level of the line. Her intellect effervesces in the pun-spiked prose, like circus champagne ... Yet for all the humor, there’s also an unmistakable melancholy to the collection. The carnival is a place for life—'everything’s alive, vital,' chants an old man at the funhouse in Thrilled to Death—but it’s a morbid kind of vitality. Again and again, a story’s carnivalesque excesses—its digressions, jokes, dreams, and variety shows—are employed to elegiac ends ... Poignant.
A rich selection of stories spanning Tillman’s singular career ... This mutability—of the psyche, of memory, of relationships, of identity—is seen in story after story as characters cloak themselves in personas they don and discard freely, and as the stories themselves shift and change. Tillman delights in exploring the limits of what’s possible within the short story form.
Shimmering ... Beguiling, playful, and inventive ... Tillman is infinitely clever and a master at concision, able to unspool both ordinary and epic tragedies in just a few pages. This is Tillman’s best book yet.
