1246 Folsom Street
San Francisco, California 94103

Lynne Tillman reads from her book American Genius: A Comedy (Soft Skull Press).

On the publisher's site, the description of the book is: "This is what we'd get if Jane Austen were writing in 21st century America--a book that expands the possibilities of the national novel and of the female protagonist. Tillman brings into being a microcosm of American democracy, a scholarly colony functioning like Melville's Pequod, in which competing values--rationality and irrationality, generosity and selfishness, love and lust, shame and honor--compete with one another through a hilarious narrative, cycling through skin disease, chair design, Manifest Destiny--folded into the narrator's memories and emotional life, culminating, in Wagnerian fashion, in a supernatural event, offering escape, transcendence, or perhaps nothing…"

Lynne Tillman, Associate Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, is the author of four novels, two collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two nonfiction books. She has collaborated often with artists and writes regularly on culture. Her novels include No Lease on Life (1997) that 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 (1995). Absence Makes the Heart (1990) and The Broad Picture (1997) are both collections of Tillman's essays that were published in literary and art periodicals. In 1995, Tillman's The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965-1967 was published with photographs by Stephen Shore, and it presented Factory personalities' narratives as well as her critical essay on Warhol, his art, and studio. Tillman is also the author of the nonfiction book The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. (1999) a cultural history of a literary landmark, where writers and artists would congregate for nearly 20 years. She has taught at Princeton and Bard College and is Fiction Editor for BOMB Magazine. More recently Tillman’s short story The Shadow of Doubt appeared in Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal published by the Center for Art and Visual Culture in Baltimore. Her new novel American Genius, A Comedy will be released in October on Soft Skull Press.

Official Website: http://www.sfcamerawork.org/events.html

Added by MarkPritchard on October 24, 2006