American Genius, A Comedy

Grand and minute, elegiac and hilarious, Lynne Tillman expands the possibilities of the American novel in this dazzling read about a former historian ruminating on her own life and the lives of others–named a best book of the century by Vulture.

In the hypnotic, masterful American Genius, A Comedy, a former historian spending time in a residential home, mental institute, artist’s colony, or sanitarium, is spinning tales of her life and ruminating on her many and varied preoccupations: chair design, textiles, pet deaths, family trauma, a lost brother, the Manson family, the Zulu alphabet, loneliness, memory, and sensitive skin–and what “sensitivity” means in our culture and society.

Showing what might happen if Jane Austen were writing in 21st-century America, Tillman fashions a microcosm of American democracy: a scholarly colony functioning like Melville’s Pequod. All this is folded into the narrator’s memories and emotional life, culminating in a seance that may offer escape and transcendence–or perhaps nothing at all.

About the Author

Lynne Tillman is a writer from New York. Since the mid-1980s, she has published novels, short stories, non-fiction, and criticism, including Haunted Houses (1987), Cast in Doubt(1992), The Madame Realism Complex (1992), American Genius, A Comedy (2006), and most recently, her first book-length autobiographical essay Mothercare: On Obligation, Love, Death, and Ambivalence (2023). In 2014, her essay collection What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, in which she wrote about Andy Warhol, Etel Adnan, and the Rolling Stones, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She is also known for writing about art, including a column she penned in Frieze for many years.