No Lease on Life - Softcover

Tillman, Lynne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1935869019 ISBN 13: 9781935869016

Publisher: Red Lemonade, 2021

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

"Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck gettin' dirt 'n' gritty...." The Lovin' Spoonful's song might easily be the anthem for Elizabeth Hall, the protagonist of Lynne Tillman's fourth novel, No Lease on Life. Elizabeth lives in the hottest, grittiest city of all, New York, and Tillman's novel follows 24 hours in the life of this urban heroine. Unlike many novels set in New York's mean streets, Elizabeth is neither rich nor poor, and she isn't particularly alienated or particularly crazy; her charm lies precisely in her ordinariness; she's well educated, has a job, and lives with a boyfriend she loves in a rent-controlled apartment that she likes. Elizabeth even likes her neighbourhood, the rundown drug- infested East Village, and has befriended a prostitute named Jeanine and a bag lady called Gisela among others. But lately the noise in the streets--the car alarms, the breaking glass, the relentless high- decibel hi-jinx of the junkies and dealers in the wee small hours of the morning--has been getting to her. Elizabeth can't sleep, and as she sits staring out her window at the "morons" below, violent fantasies flit through her head.

Readers expecting a buildup to shattering violence will be disappointed. Instead Tillman delivers a quirky, tough tale of a resilient woman having a bad day. When, at the end, Elizabeth takes a little naughty revenge on her tormentors, readers can rest assured that this slightly-frayed-around-the-edges heroine will live to fight another day. --Amazon.com

About the Author

Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays, and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists, writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her last collection of short stories, This Is Not It, included 23 stories based on the work of 22 contemporary artists. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy, Cast in Doubt, and Motion Sickness, among others. She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, professor and writer-in-residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Red Lemonade
• Publication date: 2021
• ISBN 10: 1935869019
• ISBN 13: 9781935869016
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 230