Thrilled to Death: Selected Stories
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.
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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.
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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.
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