Have you read Lynne Tillman’s work? Many readers have not—too many, contend the writer’s fans, who include such literary all-stars as Hilton Als, Colm Tóibín, and Fran Lebowitz.

Over her long career, the New York–based writer, now 77, has published seven novels, five collections of stories, and five nonfiction books. Her work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Katherine Anne Porter Award.

Tillman’s 2014 essay collection What Would Lynne Tillman Do? was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. On that occasion, writer Elissa Schappell lauded her as “one of the 20th century’s finest and most original cultural commentators” and “surely its most underappreciated.”

“Underappreciated,” “unsung,” “underrecognized,” and a label she calls “the kiss of death,” “a writer’s writer”: Tillman has been called all of them. With the publication of Thrilled to Death: Selected Stories (Soft Skull Press, March 25)—a career-spanning collection in which the author “delights in exploring the limits of what’s possible within the short story form,” according to our starred review—she hopes to change that.

In 41 stories, selected from 35 years of her oeuvre, Tillman traverses topics including sex and death, connection and isolation, pleasure and pain. She experiments with form (“Myself as a Menu” takes the format of a restaurant menu) and viewpoint (in the opening story, “Come and Go,” perspective shifts unpredictably). She plays with language, grammar, syntax, rhythm, and sound, arranging and rearranging words and layering meaning. She takes us inside her character’s heads, their thoughts both so specific and so universal that they begin to feel like our own.

“Most experiences are not just our own,” Tillman says over the phone from the East Village apartment she shares with her husband, bassist David Hofstra. “We face many of the same issues, independent of class, gender, family background. People have a lot of pain in their lives.”

Writing in the New Yorker, Tóibín called Tillman “a rich noticer of strange things and a good maker of sentences and phrases.”

Along with insight, Tillman brings the reader some pretty great laughs. Her characters might mistake a broken phone for a sign of an impending breakup or flirt with what turns out to be a stain on the wall—absurd misunderstandings that, if we’re honest with ourselves, we understand deeply. Such candor may be Tillman’s most defining feature as a writer.

“I’ve always tried to be honest,” she says.

Because most of the stories in the collection were originally published in literary magazines and art books, they weren’t seen by a lot of people, “even my friends,” Tillman says. “An anthology really helps bring together work most people have not ever read or seen.”

With an eye toward variety—different voices, characters, and types of stories—and toward finding pieces that reflect their time and still hold up, Tillman worked with publisher and editor Richard Nash to sort through her large body of work.

“I could be dubious about what was left out and what stayed in,” she admits about the selection process, but in the end she’s pleased with the results, calling the final collection a “Top of the Pops.”

Nash also helped Tillman decide in what order to arrange the stories they included. “I didn’t want a normal order, not chronological,” she says. She and Nash settled on arranging the work “associationally.”

There’s an ineffable, dreamlike quality to Tillman’s work. While she believes a writer should “use everything,” her approach to using her own dreams has changed over time. “The unconscious fascinates me. Earlier in my writing, I used dreams more frequently, but at a certain point I stopped,” she says. “I didn’t want readers to get caught up in something they couldn’t enter.”

Some of the stories in Thrilled to Death, which are all fictional, feel so real that readers may conclude they are autobiographical. They’d be mistaken.  Like most writers, Tillman may find inspiration in real events or people or use something from her own experience as “material.” (She says her close observation of people started early, a survival tactic as her family’s youngest child.) “I don’t really write about myself,” she says.

She’s not displeased by the confusion, however. In fact, she’s rather tickled. “Writing fiction is about plucking the imagination,” she says. If people believe the things that happen to her characters have, in fact, happened to Tillman herself, it’s due to “their own imaginations, their desires.”

Tillman formed her strategy of attaching to a reader’s own desire when, around age 12 and already bent on becoming a writer, she asked one of her two older sisters to tell her something about writing. “She said, ‘You should take the reader by the hand,’” Tillman recalls. “That has always stayed with me, that idea that you are drawing the reader along with you.”

As for her relative lack of recognition, Tillman is philosophical, citing Gertrude Stein, whom she considers a literary model. “Not everybody is going to be interested in your work. They have other interests,” Tillman says. “You have to come to realize that.”

She says she feels lucky just to be able to do the work and sustain herself as a writer—her work teaching writing at the University at Albany helps—and to have written as she likes, without having to cater to the market. Writing, she says, “is a place for me to work out ideas, to be in conversation, even with myself, but also to disappear. Life is hard. When I write, I’m inventing another space in which I can live.”

Marveling that every story she’s ever written has been published, Tillman says she’s pleased that her work has reached the audience it has—and that it continues to reach new readers. Her first novella, Weird Fucks, which was originally published in 1980 and an excerpt of which is included Thrilled to Death, was recently republished in the U.K. Its frank (though not graphic), feminist, often funny consideration of sexual experiences following the Sexual Revolution—defined, Tillman says, by a “loss of romance”—recently prompted one 18-year-old reader to write Tillman and say the book had helped her grapple with her own sexuality and expand her sense of what was possible. “I’d never gotten anything like that,” Tillman says. “Everything new is also old.”

Of course, a career-spanning collection raises the idea of legacy. How would Tillman, currently at work on a new novel, like to be remembered? “If I get remembered at all, that’s nice,” she says. “I know too much about how writers disappear.” Ultimately, she says the idea of a legacy is not terribly important to her. “I’d like people to read my work now,” she says, “while I’m alive.”

Amy Reiter is a writer in Brooklyn.