A young woman drifts through a series of one night stands and truncated love affairs. Finding herself in a series of increasingly bizarre situations, she turns her curious and savage eye out on the foibles of the world around her. The men of this world evade and simper, they prey, and preen, and fall hopelessly in love. Through these snapshots we get a biting psychopathology, not just of masculinity in its various masks, but of sex and desire in the early 1970s.

A stunning, focused document of Nate Lowman’s work from the past four years. ---------- "Brewing the good, the bad, and the ugly of consumerist modern life in his masterful paintings, Lowman draws a portrait of the times that is equally mischievous and somber." - BOMB Magazine ----------- With an archive of source material amassed and processed over time, Lowman creates slippery, layered images that transform visual referents found in the news, media, and art history. In this volume, Lowman plays with cataclysmic imagery that probes the tensions between the everyday and the extreme, presence and absence, and violence and representation. In his vibrant paintings of digitally rendered hurricane imagery and crime scene photography cataloging the aftermath of the October 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, he considers the physicality of his medium in connection to the chaos of his subject matter. Spotlighting Lowman’s exhibitions at David Zwirner in London and New York along with other recent work, this monograph includes a text by Lynne Tillman that provides a unique perspective across all bodies of Lowman’s oeuvre. In an interview with Andrew Paul Woolbright for The Brooklyn Rail, Lowman discusses his engagement with representation and meaning, twentieth-century gestural and pop art, slow painting, and American violence.

From the acclaimed cult writer of Weird Fucks For the narrator of Motion Sickness life is an unguided tour, populated with hotels and strangers, art, books, and films. Adrift in Europe, her life becomes a carousel of unusual encounters, where coincidences and luck shape la vita nuova. In London our narrator is befriended by an expatriate American Buddhist and her mysterious husband. In Paris she meets Arlette, an art historian obsessed with Velazquez’s painting ‘Las Meninas’. In Barcelona she meets two generations of Germans. She tours the hill towns of Italy in a London taxi with two surprising Englishmen in pursuit of art and Henry Moore. She buys postcards to send, but often tears them up, not sure of what the pictures mean. At once dreamlike and tough, hilarious and melancholic, Motion Sickness is a contemporary picaresque in which a young woman drifts and reinvents herself with every new encounter.

The first comprehensive monograph on one of today’s most innovative and successful painters – made in close collaboration with the artist Defined by bold brushstrokes, a dynamic use of color and imaginative compositions, the paintings of Dana Schutz are panoramic expanses that offer visions of humanity in all its complex facets. Her deeply subjective approach, untethered from realism, translates into images that seem to exist in a place that transcends time while celebrating the intrinsic qualities of her medium of choice with freedom and intelligence. As the artist herself stated, ‘I’m interested in painting as an affective place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting.’ This first comprehensive monograph on her work was created in close collaboration with the artist and features a number of never-before-seen paintings and drawings.

From the brilliantly original novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman comes Mothercare, an honest and beautifully written account of a sudden, drastically changed relationship to one's mother, and of the time and labor spent navigating the American healthcare system When a mother's unusual health condition, normal pressure hydrocephalus, renders her entirely dependent on you, your sisters, caregivers, and companions, the unthinkable becomes daily life. In Mothercare, Tillman describes doing what seems impossible: handling her mother as if she were a child and coping with a longtime ambivalence toward her. In Tillman's celebrated style and as a 'rich noticer of strange things' (Colm Toibin), she describes, without flinching, the unexpected, heartbreaking, and anxious eleven years of caring for a sick parent. Mothercare is both a cautionary tale and sympathetic guidance for anyone who suddenly becomes a caregiver. This story may be helpful, informative, consoling, or upsetting, but it never fails to underscore how impossible it is to get the job done completely right.

From the author of Weird Fucks, a witty, bleak, and outrageous account of American girlhood. Haunted Houses is the story of three young women. Jane's occasionally violent father reads her the Gettysburg Address at bedtimes, while Emily's parents are FDR Democrats who only privately concede she may be normal. Grace believes her dolls come alive at night and talk against her, and has a mother who likes animals more than people. Tillman charts the girls' unsteady drift into womanhood, revealing the multiple forms of inheritance - family, gender, culture - that a girl must swallow or rebel against. Haunted Houses is about the past within the present, the inescapability of private memory and public history. In prose that is uncanny and precise, it showcases Lynne Tillman at her boldest and most trenchant.

Written between 1913 and 1929, revolutionary years in art history, Dix Portraits conveys the deep human engagement between an artist and her subject. The artist's book unites Stein's ten portraits in prose with sketches by five artists: Pablo Picasso, Christian Berard, Eugene Berman, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Kristians Tonny. Utilizing the interplay between word and image, Stein's writing and the artists' images provide nuance and depth, balancing humor and sincerity. With a new introduction by Lynne Tillman, Dix Portraits is an unforgettable artistic collaboration. The subjects represented include Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Erik Satie, Pavel Tchelitchew, Virgil Thomson, Christian Berard, Bernard Fay, Kristians Tonny, Georges Hugnet, and Eugene Berman. Originally printed in an edition of 100 copies with the lithography, and now widely accessible for the first time, Dix Portraits captures Stein's legacy as a champion of artists and a pioneer of creativity.

"Invalid Format" is an archive of the widespread activities of Triple Canopy, the New York-based magazine and publisher. The book translates into print work that originally appeared in other forms. The third volume of "Invalid Format" includes artist projects and literary work published online in the third and fourth years of Triple Canopy's existence, as well as documentation of public programs. In form and content, the book explores how works produced for the screen and live settings might be transposed to the codex in a way that recalls former contexts while also fully inhabiting the page. It includes contributions by Michael Almereyda, Kurt Beals, Mel Bochner, Daniel Bozhkov, Paul Chan, Joshua Cohen, Jordan Crandall, Simon Critchley, Moyra Davey, Roe Ethridge, Ellie Ga, Daniel Gordon, Vivian Gornick, David Graeber, Group Theory, Joseph McElroy, Tom McCarthy, Matt Mullican, Ken Okiishi, Eve Sussman, Lynne Tillman and McKenzie Wark, among others.

Warhol's Factory as seen through the lens of a young Shore, providing an insider view of this extraordinary moment and place Stephen Shore was 17 years old when he began hanging out at The Factory - Andy Warhol's legendary studio in Manhattan. Between 1965 and 1967, Shore spent nearly every day there, taking pictures of its diverse cast of characters, from musicians to actors, artists to writers, and including Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed, and Nico - not to mention Warhol himself. This book presents a personal selection of photographs from Shore's collection, providing an insider's view of this extraordinary moment and place, as seen through the eyes of one of photography's most beloved practitioners.

Following in the photographic lineage of Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, Justine Kurland’s work examines the story of America—and the idea of the American dream juxtaposed against the reality. Her deep interest in the road, the western frontier, escape, and ways of living outside mainstream values pervade this stunning and important body of work. Since 2004, Kurland and her young son, Casper, have traveled in their customized van, going south in the winter and north in the summer, her life as an artist and mother finely balanced between the need for routine and the desire for freedom and surprise. Casper’s interest —particularly in trains, and later in cars—and those he befriends along the way often determine Kurland’s subject matter. He appears at different ages in the work, against open vistas and among the subcultures of train-hoppers and drifters around them. Kurland’s vision is in equal parts raw and romantic, idyllic and dystopian. From highly symbolic pictures of trains moving across epic landscapes to allegorical depictions of mechanics and muscle cars, this book features the full scope of her road work—from her series This Train is Bound for Glory, to her most recent, Sincere Auto Care.

The complete art world story/essays of the fictional Madame Realism, collected for the first time. The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories gathers together Lynne Tillman's groundbreaking fiction/essays on culture and places, monuments, artworks, iconic TV shows, and received ideas, written in the third person to record the subtle, ironic, and wry observations of the playful but stern "Madame Realism." Through her use of a fictional character, Tillman devised a new genre of writing that melded fiction and theory, sensation, and critical thought, disseminating her third-person art writer's observations in such magazines as Art in America and in a variety of art exhibition catalogs and artist books. Two decades after the original publication of these texts, her approach to investigation through embodied thought has been wholly absorbed by a new generation of artists and writers. Provocative and wholly pleasurable, Tillman's stories/essays dissect the mundane with alarming precision. As Lydia Davis wrote of her work, "Our assumptions shift. The every day becomes strange, paradox is embraced, and the unexpected is always around the corner." This new collection also includes the complete stories of Tillman's other persona, the quixotic author Paige Turner (whose investigation of the language of love overshoots any actual experience of it), and additional stories and essays that address figures such as the "Translation Artist" and Cindy Sherman.

Here is an American mind contemplating contemporary society and culture with wit, imagination, and a brave intelligence. Tillman upends expectations, shifts tone, introduces characters, breaches limits of genre and category, reconfiguring the world with the turn of a sentence. Like other unique thinkers, Tillman sees the world differently--she is not a malcontent, but she is discontented. Her responses to art and literature, to social and political questions change the reader's mind, startling it with new angles. Which is why so many of us who know her work often wonder: what would Lynne Tillman do? A long-time resident of New York, Tillman's sharp humor is like her city's, tough and hilarious. There are distinct streams of concern coursing through the seeming eclecticism of topics--Hillary Clinton, Jane Bowles, O.J. Simpson, art and artists, Harry Mathews, the state of fiction, film, the state of her mind, the State of the Nation. There is a great variety, but what remains consistent is how differently she writes about them, how well she understands, how passionate and bold her writing is. What does Lynne Tillman do? Everything. Anything. You name it. She has a conversation with you, and you're a better, smarter person for it.

Ezekiel Hooper Stark is a cultural anthropologist nudging forty. His interest is family snapshots. At home, he is absorbed by his own family's idiosyncrasies, perversities, and pathologies, until romantic betrayal sends him spiralling into a crisis. All the old models of masculinity are broken. Zeke embarks on a new project, studying the 'New Man', born under the sign of feminism. What do you expect from women? he asks his male subjects. What do you expect from yourself? Meanwhile, what will the reader make of Zeke is he enlightened, chauvinistic, or simply delusional? Kaleidoscopic and encyclopaedic, comic, tragic, and philosophical, Men and Apparitions showcases Lynne Tillman not only as a brilliantly original novelist but also as one of our most prominent contemporary thinkers on art, culture and the politics of gender.

In uncompromising and fresh prose, Tillman tells the story of three very contemporary girls. Grace, Emily and Jane collide with friends, family, and culture under dark and comic circumstances, presented in uncanny, disturbing, and sometimes shocking terms. In Haunted Houses, Tillman wries of the past within the present, and of the inescapability of private memory and public history. A caustic account of how America makes and unmakes a young woman.

While the tumultuous 1970s rock the world around them, a collection of aging expatriates linger in a quiet town on the island of Crete, where they have escaped their pasts and their present. Among them is Horace, a gay American writer who fears he has finally reached old age. Friends only frustrate him, and his youthful Greek lover provides little satisfaction. Idling his time away with alcohol and working on a novel that he will never finish, Horace feels closer than ever to his own sorry end. That is, until a young, enigmatic American woman named Helen joins his crowd of outsiders. In Helen, Horace discovers someone brilliant, beautiful, and stubbornly mysterious -- in short, she becomes his absolute obsession. But as Horace knows, people have a way of preserving their secrets even as they try to forget them. Soon, Helen's past begins to follow her to Crete. A suicidal ex-lover appears without warning; whispers of her long-dead sister surface in local gossip; and signs of ancient Gypsy rituals come to the fore. Helen vanishes. Deep down, Horace knows that he must find her before he can find any peace within himself.

In uncompromising and fresh prose, Tillman tells the story of three very contemporary girls. Grace, Emily and Jane collide with friends, family, and culture under dark and comic circumstances, presented in uncanny, disturbing, and sometimes shocking terms. In Haunted Houses, Tillman wries of the past within the present, and of the inescapability of private memory and public history. A caustic account of how America makes and unmakes a young woman.

While the tumultuous 1970s rock the world around them, a collection of aging expatriates linger in a quiet town on the island of Crete, where they have escaped their pasts and their present. Among them is Horace, a gay American writer who fears he has finally reached old age. Friends only frustrate him, and his youthful Greek lover provides little satisfaction. Idling his time away with alcohol and working on a pulp novel that he will never finish, Horace feels closer than ever to his own sorry end. That is, until a young, enigmatic American woman named Helen joins his crowd of outsiders. In Helen, Horace discovers someone brilliant, beautiful, and stubbornly mysterious -- in short, she becomes his absolute obsession. But as Horace knows, people have a way of preserving their secrets even as they try to forget them. Soon, Helen's past begins to follow her to Crete. A suicidal ex-lover appears without warning; whispers of her long-dead sister surface in local gossip; and signs of ancient Gypsy rituals come to the fore. Helen vanishes. Deep down, Horace knows that he must find her before he can find any peace within himself.

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.

This book channels the rage, filth, anguish, and the bust-a-gut hilarity of pre-gentrified New York. The New York of Lynne Tillman's hilarious, audacious fourth novel is a boiling point of urban decay. The East Village streets are overrun with crooked cops, drug addicts, pimps, and prostitutes. Garbage piles up along the sidewalks amid the blaring soundtrack of car stereos. Confrontations are supercharged by the summer heat wave. This merciless noise has left Elizabeth Hall an insomniac. Junkies roam her building and overturn trashcans, but the landlord refuses to help clean or repair the decrepit conditions. Live-in boyfriend Roy is good-natured but too avoidant to soothe the sores of city life. Though Elizabeth fights for sanity in this apathetic metropolis, violent fantasies threaten to push her over the edge. In vivid detail, she begins to imagine murders: those of the "morons" she despises, and, most obsessively, her own. Frightening, hilarious, and wholly addictive, No Lease on Life is an avant-garde sucker-punch, a plea for humanity propelled by dark wit and unflinching honesty. Tillman's spare prose, frank, poignant and always illuminating, captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in America's toughest, hottest melting pot.

The writing of Craig Owens explored the relations among contemporary art, sexuality, race and power. During the fifteen years (1975-1990) that he lived in New York and wrote criticism for "Art in America", "October" and other publications, Owens covered a wide range of cultural practices: dance, architecture, art, literature, film, performance and theatre. Owens was trained as an art historian, but he is better described as a cultural critic and theorist, whose writings called into question established boundaries between disciplines, especially the separation of theory from practice. A major voice in postmodern culture and politics, Owens is equally well known and regarded for his contribution to debates around poststructuralism, sexual difference and gay politics.