The stories in Some Day This Will Be Funny marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne
Tillman, author of American Genius, presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators by turn infamous and nameless
shift within their own skin, struggling to unknot reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus, then cool, twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle,
quotation, and haiku bounce between lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillman’s preferred subject: the unsettled mind. Collectively, these stories
own a conscience shaped by oaths made and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by love’s shifting chartreuse. They traffic in the quiet images of personal history, each one
a flickering sacrament in danger of being swallowed up by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking tickets shoved in the glove compartment, a little black book hidden
from a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planter stuffed with flowers to keep out the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned with candor and animated by fits of wordplay and invention
stories that affirm Tillman’s unshakable talent for wedding the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence, defying genre and defining experimental short
fiction.
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We’re All in This Together
$2,700 -
This Angel on My Chest
$663 -
The Promise of Water
$698 -
For a Little While
$665 -
Best Worst American: Stories
$560 -
The Viewing Room: Stories
$663 -
Desi Girls: Stories by Indian Women Writers Abroad
$523 -
Darkness and Light
$418 -
19½ Stories: Library Edition
$2,695 -
The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers
$805 -
Entropy in Bloom: Stories
$910 -
Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories
$525 -
The Dark Tower: And Other Stories
$490 -
Wait Till You See Me Dance: Stories
$442 -
Half a Reason to Die
$593 -
Sharp Ends: Stories from the World of the First Law
$560 -
Dat’s Love and Other Stories
$488 -
Fen: Stories
$560 -
The Ghost Who Bled
$558 -
Simple Gifts: Four Heartwarming Christmas Stories
$210