Haunted Houses

(Paperback, Second Edition)

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In uncompromising and fresh prose, Tillman tells the story of three very contemporary girls. Grace, Emily and Jane collide with friends, family, and culture under dark and comic circumstances, presented in uncanny, disturbing, and sometimes shocking ways. In Haunted Houses, Tillman writes of the past within the present, and of the inescapability of private memory and public history.A caustic account of how America makes and unmakes a young woman.

Reviews

In Haunted Houses, Lynne Tillman chronicles the loneliness of childhood and incipient womanhood, the salvation of friendship, and the neurotic chain that binds perpetually needy daughters to their perpetually self-absorbed parents. . . . Her style is spare and compelling, the effect of clinical authenticity." - New York Times Book Review

"Ms. Tillman's characters are rigorously drawn, with a scrupulous regard for the truth of their inner lives . . . this is one of the most interesting works of fiction in recent times . . . Fans of both truth and fancy should find nourishment here." - LA Weekly

"Lynne Tillman's protagonists are so lifelike, engaging and accessible, one could overlook, though hardly remain unaffected by, the quality of her prose, with its unique balancing of character interrogation and headlong entertainment. Haunted Houses achieves that hardest of things: a fresh involvement of overheard life with the charisma of intelligent fiction. Its pleasures pull their weight."-Dennis Cooper

"This complex and skillfully constructed novel has three separate storylines following the lives of three girls growing up in New York, maturing in a world of baffling freedoms and uncertainties.... Childhood fears, passionate friendships, sexual explorations, and the uncomfortable interdependency of parents and children are depicted with intelligence, honesty, and dark humor. But if you are looking for comfort and consolation, you must look elsewhere: Tillman writes about life as it is, not as we might wish it to be." -Sunday Times

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's haunted houses are Freudian ones &emdash the psyches of three girls, Emily, Jane, and Grace, each wrestling with the psychological 'ghosts' that shape them . . . . Frequently shifting points of view are expressed in crisp sentences. Rather than forming a modernist stream of consciousness, however, the writing remains controlled." - Lucy Atkins, Times Literary Supplement

Author Bio

Lynne Tillman (New York, NY) is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1998) which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast in Doubt (1992), Motion Sickness (1991), and Haunted Houses (1987). The Broad Picture (1997) collected Tillman's essays, which were published in literary and art periodicals. Her most recent book, Someday This Will Be Funny was a New York Times Editors Choice and an Oprah Summer Reading Pick. She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.