by Lynne Tillman
published 25 September 2025
From the author of Weird Fucks, a new selection of stories about sex, death, memory, and anxiety
Over the last four decades, Lynne Tillman has established herself as one of America’s most audacious writers, a tireless innovator whose shorter works have reimagined the story form.
Thrilled to Death collects a bold, anarchic, and eclectic ensemble of Tillman’s fictions. By turns outrageous and melancholy, meditative and abrupt, these stories are animated by deliciously paradoxical characters who are imbued with intelligence and ambivalence.
Curated by the author, this definitive collection will surprise and delight established fans and new readers alike.
LYNNE TILLMAN is a novelist, and cultural critic, twice finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Tillman is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writing Fellowship.
Praise for Thrilled to Death
‘[Tillman’s] stories seem to best foreground certain aspects of her writing: a determined oddity of address to the reader, a playful but pitiless application of ideas, and a comedy that might be most astringent over the space and time of this shorter form . . . An incomparable writer.’ Brian Dillon, 4Columns
‘This shimmering, career-spanning collection captures Tillman at her most beguiling, playful, and inventive . . . Tillman is infinitely playful and a master at concision, able to unspool both ordinary and epic tragedies in just a few pages. This is Tillman’s best book yet.’ Publishers Weekly (starred review)
‘There’s a lot of sex in a lot of places in Lynne Tillman’s suggestive stories: Someone will love you. Dirty dishes rebuke. Mother knits. Lily Lee didn’t leave Frank at the altar. Tillman’s way with words—unexpected but exact—is stupendous. Totally stupendous.‘ Nell Painter
‘Lynne Tillman is an emissary from a vanishing literary culture . . . Tillman writes for grown-ups, but the kind who are constantly tending to their inner children . . . In an era of truncated attention spans, her short stories, some verging on micro, seem newly with-it. Her one-liners can do more than certain entire volumes.‘ Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times
Tillman is an artist who knows how to handle an ending; these stories are pressurized like diamonds and never fail to stick the landing. Aphoristic, associative, and seemingly charged by the kind of self-understanding that can only be achieved by decades of psychoanalysis . . . Tillman is one of the last of her kind—this collection contains the lawlessness of stylists like Barry Hannah and Diane Williams and the savage, tender intelligence of critics like Susan Sontag and Gary Indiana.‘ Anika Jade Levy, The Whitney Review