Haunted Houses

Product Information

Her father said Jimmy was dirty. He didn’t brush his teeth much, even when he dropped by to see Jane. Sometimes their meetings were accidental, but Jane didn’t really believe in accidents. If questioned she would deride notions of fate—she was very rational—but still she thought Jimmy and she were meant for each other. Now that he was a senior, he drove his convertible into the city, and spent time with people Jane didn’t know. Though one high school yearbook picture shows her sitting in his convertible, it was unusual to find her there.

An Interview with Lynne Tillman The novelist and critic discusses her new book of fiction—Men and Apparitions. [12] Alongside the mummy issues in the novel, there is internal conflict directed at ‘daddy’. Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ from the eponymous poem feels close when reading these passages. The daddy issues that the novel works through feel rooted in a modernist style, with wrought depictions of the interiority of characters. There is a passage about Jane’s father that grapples with these complex feelings within the general landscape of our harmful patriarchy: ‘but he’s your father, he’s not any man. Not any man. He is a man, the first man I knew. He was the only man for all of us, all of us women, wife, girls, daughters… He hates himself. He hates all of us. He loves himself sometimes, he loves us sometimes. Oh, Daddy’. These conflicting statements (here whirled and whipped by the winds of repetition) explore the uncertainty of self, an uncertainty that we hope will eventually settle within us, but Tillman shows us that they remain in adult life – even parenthood.Lynne Tillman: It has its compensations, I guess. But the audience for good fiction, fiction in which the authors are really trying to advance the medium, is quite small. One of the things that happen when your first book comes out is you go into a bookstore and… it’s just a book, among hundreds and thousands of books. And it’s inescapable, the fact that your book is likely not to be recognised. I was very naive when Haunted Houses came out because I had no idea that [the publishing industry] wasn’t a meritocracy. I really did believe that everything happened because of the quality of your work. And, of course, that’s not true. What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (2014) , her second essay collection, was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism in 2014.

Lynne Tillman's writing uncovers hidden truths, reveals the unnamable, and leads us into her personal world of pain, pleasure, laughter, fear and confusion, with a clarity of style that is both remarkable and exhilarating. Honest. Simple. Deep. Authentic. Daring... To read her is, in a sense, to become alive, because she lives so thoroughly in her work. Lynne Tillman is, quite simply, one of the best writers alive today."-John Zorn Lynne Tillman: Men and Apparitions, archived from the original on 2021-12-14 , retrieved 2021-09-30

Delivery Costs

Hotjar sets this cookie to identify a new user’s first session. It stores a true/false value, indicating whether it was the first time Hotjar saw this user.