AMERICAN GENIUS: A COMEDY

Book ID/图书代码： 07633018C00351

English Summary/英文概要： Lynne Tillman’s previous novels have won her both popular approval and critical praise from such literary heavyweights as Edmund White and Colm Tóibín. With American Genius, her first novel since 1998’s No Lease on Life, she shows what might happen if Jane Austen were writing in 21st-century America. Employing her trademark crystalline prose and intricate, hypnotic sentences, Tillman fashions a microcosm of American democracy: a scholarly colony functioning like Melville’s Pequod. In this otherworld, competing values — rationality and irrationality, generosity and selfishness, love and lust, shame and honor — collide through a witty narrative, cycling through such disparate tropes as skin disease, chair design, and Manifest Destiny. All this is folded into the narrator’s memories and emotional life, culminating in a séance that may offer escape and transcendence — or perhaps nothing. Grand and minute, elegiac and hilarious, Lynne Tillman expands the possibilities of the American novel in this dazzling read.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 琳恩•蒂尔曼的前几部小说既赢得了大众的认可，也获得了埃德蒙•怀特和科尔姆•托宾等文学巨酱的赞誉。自1998年第一部小说《纽约女人夜未眠》之后，在《美国天才》中她设想了如果简•奥斯汀在21世纪的美国写作将会发生什么。蒂尔曼运用她那标志性的水晶般透明风格的的散文和错综复杂、摄人心魄的句子，塑造了一个美国民主的缩影：一个像梅尔维尔笔下的裴廓德号(Pequod)那样运转的学术殖民地。在另一个世界里，作者用诙谐的语调叙述了各种相互竞争的价值观——理性与非理性、慷慨与自私、爱与欲望、羞耻与荣誉——之间的相互碰撞；并将它们比喻成皮肤病、座椅设计和天命等，描绘了彼此间的循环往复。所有的一切都融入了叙述者的记忆和情感生活，最终在一场能够提供逃避和超越、或者什么都无法提供的降神会达到高潮。在这本令人眼花缭乱的作品中，林恩•蒂尔曼用悲歌和欢声笑语将美国小说的可能性进行了拓展。（XMM）

Awards/获奖情况：“有缺陷但美丽；神圣却疯狂。”——乔治•桑德斯

“《美国天才》是一部杰作。”——哈利•马修斯

“她是我世俗的艺术天使。”——莉迪亚•约克纳为什

“这是一本大胆的小说，带着巨大的好奇心，对小说的定义给出了建议。”——《纽约时报书评》

“Flawed, beautiful, sacred, insane.”—George Saunders

“American Genius is a masterpiece.”— Harry Mathews

“She is my secular art angel”— Lidia Yuknavitch

“What emerges here is a bold showcase of a novel, a cabinet of curiosity, a proposal for what fiction could be.”— The New York Times Book Review-Cleveland Review of Books review, “If Jane Austen were pulled along a post-modern highway into the 21st century, forced to shed her fixation on marriage being the ultimate happy ending, the resulting novel might read a little like this.”

-4Columns review, “Tillman gives us a mind hilariously on fire with compensatory distractions, bristling with facts that may not help at all . . . The woman’s mind spins, and with it a voice that’s ardent and ironic, knowing and oblivious, repetitive and contradictory . . . What kind of ‘comedy’ is this? . . . The comedy, surely of a sort of late modernism, familiar from Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard: novelists whose narrators simply can’t be quiet, but find themselves yammering away, the brain always buzzing, dry lips smacking and teeth clacking as their stories and theories and opinions come tumbling out . . . American Genius, A Comedy was timely in 2006, and still feels queasily of our moment.”

-TANK Magazine excerpts and says, “American Genius, A Comedy is a novel of digression. Refusing linear plot for the meandering structure of recollection, the book takes the form of an stream-of-thought monologue delivered by a former American historian residing in a mysterious, clinic-like setting that might be a sanatorium or an artist’s retreat but might also be something more sinister. In slippery paragraphs always on the edge of incoherence, we hear about the narrator’s interest in baths, textiles, underarm waxing, the quirks and habits of most of her co-patients, and the history of slavery. A portrait of excessive interiority.”

-The Paris Review publishes the introduction

-The Believer publishes a conversation between Lynne and Chloe Aridjis

-NYLON includes it the 50 Best Books to Read in 2019, saying, “If you’re looking for a book to really just get lost in, this re-release of Lynne Tillman’s dense, winding, frantically brilliant novel is a good bet. Notice I didn’t say safe bet, because there’s little that’s safe within these pages. Instead, you’ll find the profane, twisted, knife edge-sharp thoughts of a former historian who is meditating on everything from the concept of sensitivity to the Manson murders. And you’ll receive these thoughts in the inimitable literary stylings of Tillman, who goes places few other writers can even conceive of existing.”

-Vulture includes in “100 Best Books of the 21st Century,” saying, “Tillman’s beautifully constructed sentences create their own propulsion, able to take a reader in any direction at any moment. From the opening pages, a singular consciousness emerges, both porous and radically isolated, and by stripping out most other elements, the book confirms the ultimate primacy of literary voice, of which this is a rare triumph.”

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