Praise for Men and Apparitions by Lynne Tillman Selected as "1 of 60 Books We Can''t Wait to Read in 2018" by Huffington Post Selected as "1 of 101 Books to get excited about in 2018" by BookRiot Named to "Most Anticipated Fiction of 2018" by Chicago Review of Books Named "One of the Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2018" by Big Other "Zeke is an American consumer, though what he consumes is not material goods but media, endlessly cataloging and referencing the contents of his own mind, often in lieu of visceral experience. Tillman''s novel is a patient, insistent exploration of what it means to live inside such a mind. There are elements of it that brought to mind writers as diverse as Ali Smith and Saul Bellow, Joy Williams and A. R. Ammons, but the cumulative effective is sui generis." -- The New York Times Book Review "[A] ruminative and amusing novel . At times aphoristic . the book succeeds as a gentle satire of generational self-absorption and emotional disengagement.
" -- The New Yorker , Briefly Noted "A beautiful meditation on photography." --Colm Toibin, The Guardian "Tillman, it seems to me, is not a writer who invents characters and moves them through the machinery of plot. Rather, she seems to inhabit other minds--or she lets them move through her, like a medium. The book is a study of visual culture, like Susan Sontag''s On Photography or John Berger''s Ways of Seeing . Or the book acts as a seismograph, registering shifting patterns of gender identity and its relationship to power." -- The Rumpus "With callouts to a mind-revving roster of photographers, writers, filmmakers, intellectuals, and media magnets, erudite, discerning, and everdaring Tillman has forged a mischievous conflation of criticism and fiction. Incantatory, maddening, brilliant, zestful, compassionate, and timely, Tillman''s portrait of a floundering academic trying to make sense of a digitized world of churning, contradictory messages reveals the perpetual interplay between past and present, the personal and the cultural, image and life." -- Booklist (starred review) " Men and Apparitions is a work of fiction as ventriloquy by a winking puppet.
If it is criticism, too, it knowingly undermines its own arguments . Tillman is 71, but she delves deeply into the psychology of a man half her age. In many ways, Men and Apparitions is a portrait of Generation X: caught between the analog and the digital, economic prosperity and recession, the sexually objectifying gender stereotypes of the Bush-Clinton years and the Obama-era gender revolution, Gen-X men are cleaved by history, left raw and ready for the malaise of middle age." -- Los Angeles Review of Books "Lynne Tillman''s much anticipated new novel after 12 years revolves around a cultural anthropologist who turns his anthropological lens on masculinity, art and memory. A profoundly wise and remarkably supple novel from an outstanding writer." -- Chicago Review of Books , "Most Anticipated Fiction of 2018" "A grab bag of a book, mixing text and image, fiction and nonfiction, material about the character (his history and relations) and essayistic takes on art and photography and masculinity . The idea, for her, is to explore family, identity even, as something that we want to preserve, to hold onto, even as time insists we can''t." -- Barnes & Noble Review "In Men and Apparitions , photography is both machine and magic.
Zeke''s mind is agile, funny, stylish, but follows its own interior logic, moving quickly through complex knots of ideas and references that start where he is interested, and stop when he is no longer. Reading Men and Apparitions . I thought of J. D. Salinger and his Glass family, all of whom narrate their stories with the same offhanded, articulate intelligence as Zeke. I thought of the photographer Philip Steinmetz and his work about family photo albums, a six-volume sociological ''portrait'' of himself and his relatives, in which he and his family members both are and are not themselves." -- The White Review "Lynne Tillman''s fiction is animated by critical inquiry: her characters question everyone and everything around them, they question themselves, they question their own questions . Her texts blended art-critical acumen with literary expressions of sensation and anxiety.
For Tillman, neurotic reflection is not a retreat from politics: it''s a contemporary form of sensitivity to the world and the people in it. Of course, it can also be more than a tad blinkered and narcissistic. This push and pull between curiosity and insularity is a vivifying tension in her work . Somewhat akin to John Ashbery''s liberal inclusion of clichés in his poems, Tillman''s use of familiar cultural commentary represents how individual notions of truth are often tied up in idiosyncratic or fuzzy thoughts yet can become profound in the complex context of a life, or a book . Though her writing is conceptually knotty, Tillman''s style gives her work clarity. Casual and direct, her prose is associative both in content (it skips from one digression to another) and rhythm (it is often irregular, singsongy, bouncy). No matter what genre Tillman is working in, this style suggests an endlessly unspooling talking cure, a social body attempting to imperfectly come to terms with itself. Men and Apparitions is one of her most sustained, complicated, and astute reflections on the dialectics of sensitivity.
" -- Art in America "A strange and playful hybrid of fiction and criticism, Men and Apparitions is both a probe into the psyche of obsession and a theoretical reflection on contemporary visual culture, with reference to plenty of artists, photographers, and thinkers strewn throughout." -- ArtNet , 1 of 8 Brilliant Memorial Day Books for Your Long Weekend "Comic, tragic, kaleidoscopic, brilliant and boundlessly engaging." -- TANK "[A] grand and sprawling novel. Women authors write men all of the time, and vice versa. What''s striking in this instance is the intimacy of voice, and Zeke''s focus on defining masculinity, his intent of reappropriating Henry James''s feminist ideal of the 19th-century''s self-made New Woman ( Portrait of a Lady ''s Isabel Archer, for example) to define the 21st century''s New Man. Men and Apparitions is a loose and beautiful baggy monster of a novel that opens in on itself like a fun house hall of mirrors. What a tremendous experience it is to walk through, never quite sure who''s who or what you''re looking at." -- The Millions "In a novel that overflows with obsessive, encyclopedic energy, her characters luxuriate in self-conscious play, double meaning, and provocative inquiry.
The result is a work that enlarges our understanding of what the novel can be--and the sense of self we take for granted . Tillman writes pictures the way Jeanette Winterson writes the body: with great and counterintuitive attention to detail, theorizing and revising as she goes . If Men and Apparitions is an image, it''s a Polaroid--maybe a haunted one--that someone hands you as it''s still developing. Tillman insists that there are formal and social conventions yet to be upended and rethought. Even if she doesn''t achieve it herself, the magic is that you can see them materializing in your hand . These layers are part of her brilliance in conveying the self-in-progress." -- The New Republic "Lynne Tillman lends her remarkable talents to answer questions about today''s obsession with images. Through the eyes of cultural anthropologist Ezekiel Hooper Stark, she asks: What is behind the human drive to create, remake, and keep images?" -- Bustle , 1 of 15 Best Fiction Books of March 2018 to Kick Off Your Spring Reading "Will appeal to readers with a particular interest in cultural criticism .
Tillman is a risk-taker with a wide-ranging mind who likes to experiment with the novel form. This extremely cerebral exercise is studded with fascinating observations and commentary. Literary collections will want to acquire it." -- Library Journal "News of a new Tillman novel is worthy of raising a glass." --The Millions, "Most Anticipated: The Great 2018 Book Preview" "A nimble novelist." -- Vanity Fair 1 of 99 Things to See, Hear, and Read This March -- Fast Company "Cult figure and author Lynne Tillman is back with a vengeance. After 10 years, this new novel about our obsession with images--capturing them, keeping them, showing our lives through them--is a book perfect for our generation . It''s also an incredible look into the mind of a modern man and his particular male gaze.
Tillman''s wicked imagination is worth every second." -- The Lily , 1 of 15 Titles We Recommend "Cult-favorite Lynn Tillman''s latest novel, Men and Apparitions , takes readers for a rollicking, frolicking, outstandingly original ride that explores the roots of feminism, the death of masculinity, and the cultural identities we''ve gleaned along the way, all while making us question everything we''ve ever known and taken for granted." -- PopSugar , 1 of 20 Best Books to Read This March "Lynne Tillman''s new novel, Men and Apparitions , makes a better case for women writing men . Tillman isn''t a writer you look to for plot-forward work, and Men and Apparitions is no exception, but neither does it coast on the clumsy charm of its narrator, though it could. Instead, it''s interested in something much more cerebral, and much more difficult to distill into a 600-word review. As I read it, I realized.