THRILLED TO DEATH

The stories Tillman assembles in this carefully chosen selection are emblematic of her career-long revolution against the constraints of traditional narrative.

In the opening work, “Come and Go,” three unrelated people bustle through the teeming streets of New York City, bumping into each other randomly in the green market, in a hospital, on the street, only to have their stories be interrupted by the author, who sees herself not as the God of these little fictions but as no more and no less than “someone who tells things.” In “Dead Talk,” the narrator announces, “I am Marilyn Monroe and I’m speaking from the dead,” and proceeds to alternate seamlessly between the perspectives of the third-person Marilyn, who existed as a commodity for the viewer, and the first-person Marilyn, a deeper, richer, and ultimately more imaginary being. As explosive as Tillman’s structural experiments can be, her characters are absorbingly human, invested in their lives and the details of their worlds while staying attuned to the nuanced disequilibrium of their inner landscapes. In the title story, another ensemble cast of characters is brought together, this time by a carnival where their day ends in fire, blood, lust, and the formation of an indelible memory that one of the group, Paige Turner, carries with her into old age; though she’s “never completely understood” it, she regards its telling as akin to “a fable or a myth, whose truth or falsehood was hers to cherish.” This mutability—of the psyche, of memory, of relationships, of identity—is seen in story after story as characters cloak themselves in personas they don and discard freely, and as the stories themselves shift and change. Tillman delights in exploring the limits of what’s possible within the short story form. The answer, it appears, is absolutely anything.

A rich selection of stories spanning Tillman’s singular career.