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Someday This Will Be Funny

Someday This Will Be Funny
Stories animated by fits of wordplay and invention—wedding the the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence
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Praise For

"Tillman’s gorgeous and potent latest finds the innovative author embracing diverse, imaginative forms in these often brief but always intriguing tales…With subjects ranging from birds to Marvin Gaye to an ex-lover who has earned Tillman’s wrath, these missives partake in an elegant, efficient use of language to challenge concepts of love, history, memory, and language. Tillman’s compact narratives shine and stand up to multiple readings."
- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Other Works

  1. Someday This Will Be Funny [Limited Edition] 21 weeks ago (Published)
  2. Haunted Houses 1 year ago (Published)
  3. No Lease on Life 1 year ago (Published)
  4. Cast in Doubt 1 year ago (Published)
Lynne Tillman
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.

Table of Contents

Comments

Chris Belden 6 July 2011 - 3:14pm
Richard's take on the "long sentences" strikes me as accurate, though I would add, in the case of a piece such as "More Sex," that the narrator is unable to contain herself, perhaps out of excitement, or a certain anxiety about the topic, & so the words come tumbling forth, like the proverbial stream, directed by commas & dashes & the occasional full-stop, giving us so much more than the narrator's thoughts about men & sex, but also her state of mind, her wonder, her frustration, & so in this relatively short piece we get a more fully realized glimpse into a character's mind/life (unlike in a more conventional story, say, where the sentences might be shorter, but the story itself would need to be longer in order to give us the full portrait).
Brian McFarland 14 May 2011 - 10:52am
I was trying to say the same, although far less elegantly, in regards to Corso's poems. That "intermediate zone" creates a special, tingling, frisson within one's very neurons. Chomsky's sentence is the best invoker of that feeling which inspires that odd magic feeling incited by words. Brian McFarland 13 May 2011 - 9:25am Indeed, its "the bomb"! A fine ordered senselessness which evokes a new form beauty. Green ideas sleep furiously, as They say. " I wanted to drop fire engines from my mouth but in ran the moonlight and grabbed the prunes " Off to read the article.
L.S. Bassen 13 May 2011 - 10:07am
Just read two of Lynne Tillman's stories, THE GREEK STORY and BUT THERE'S A FAMILY RESEMBLANCE. Enjoyed/admired the DINNER WITH ANDRE quality of both, preferred the second, longer story for topic and embedded dramatic question that understandably but sadly went unanswered. "And though the worst things happen in families, the most disgusting and painful, with long legacies, the family is still idealized; there’s no replacement yet." Just a note: intention of so many run-on sentences? And in the FAMILY story, there's a repeated typo of 'die' for 'the' ...
Richard Nash 14 May 2011 - 10:33am
Ah, Lynne's sentences! Here's a lovely post by Michelle Tea that discusses Lynne's sentences http://www.radarproductions.org/?p=802. "Sprawling, tangential, a hint of mania, lavishly sprinkling commas all over the place, yes," is what Michelle exclaims. My sense is that Lynne's sentence operate, ontologically, somewhere between traditional written syntax and the intermediate zone between thought and speech. So they're written and thought and spoken all at once. "Die" and "the" on the other hand? Our mistake. Sorry!

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