Critically acclaimed novelist Lynne Tillman will read from her new novel American Genius, A Comedy (Soft Skull Press, 2006) on Thursday, November 30, at 6:30 p.m. at New York University’s Fales Collection, 3rd floor of the NYU Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South. The reading celebrates the acquisition of her papers for Fales’ renowned Downtown Collection. The event is free and open to the public; to make a reservation or for information call 212.992.9018.
Tillman’s fifth novel is, according to Publishers Weekly, “an often dazzling, totally disorienting interior riff.” An unnamed woman lingers in a spa (or is it a madhouse?) where she digresses on loneliness, denim, Eames chairs, the history of silk, friendship, Puritanism, the blissfulness of sleep, and the pleasures of 100% cotton socks.
Tillman’s other novels are No Lease on Life, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast a Doubt, Motion Sickness, and Haunted Houses. She is also the author of two collections of essays, Absence Makes the Heart and The Broad Picture, as well as The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore.
Fales’ Downtown Collection at NYU documents the New York City arts and literary scene from 1974 to the present. It is the only collection of its kind in a research library and is heavily used by students, scholars, and others interested in the creative world of downtown New York.