American Genius

American Genius, A Comedy

A former historian is spending time in a residential home - but is it an artist's retreat, a sanatorium, 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.

Review: '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