Men and Apparitions

Why do human beings feel the need to create, remake, and keep images from and of everything? How are we supposed to live amid this glut of images? Men and Apparitions takes on a central question of our time through the wild musings and eventful life of Ezekiel Hooper Stark, cultural anthropologist, ethnographer, specialist in family photographs. As Zeke goes from being a child obsessed with his family's photo albums to a young and passionate researcher to a man broken by betrayal in love, his academic fascinations reflect his course, touching on such various subjects as discarded images, pet pictures, spirit mediums, the tragic life of his long-dead cousin the semi-famous socialite Clover Adams, and the nature of contemporary masculinity. Kaleidoscopic and encyclopedic, madcap and wry, Men and Apparitions showcases Lynne Tillman not only as a brilliantly original novelist but as one of our most prominent thinkers on visual art and culture today.

Men and Apparitions

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684411320
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	03/13/2018
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 5.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. She is the author of several books, including No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and The Complete Madame Realism.

Will Damron is an Audie Award-nominated narrator who has recorded books in every genre, from science fiction and fantasy to romance, YA, and nonfiction. Raised in rural southern Virginia, he has appeared Off-Broadway and on stage and screen throughout the country. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

From the B&N Reads Blog

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Editorial Reviews

01/08/2018
The latest from Tillman (American Genius, A Comedy) is a timely, if messy, exploration of modern masculinity, told from the perspective of Ezekiel Hooper Stark, a 30-something ethnographer and assistant professor who sifts through photographs to construct the narratives of family and strangers. Told in fragmented mini chapters, Zeke chronicles his own early life—absent, alcoholic father; rude older brother; semimute little sister—before pivoting to his turbulent, brief marriage to Maggie, a college sweetheart. While on a trip to London together, Zeke learns of Maggie’s love affair with his friend Curtis. The revelation sends him into a fugue state, and Zeke bounces around Europe, only to return to the United States a divorcé, pretending to be a number of different people under false names. He finds kinship in the story of his ancestor, socialite and photographer Clover Hooper Adams, and turns his attention to the study of what he calls the “New Man.” As always, Tillman is inventive in her approach to storytelling, inserting photos and allowing Zeke’s mind to wander. While there is much to admire, occasionally Zeke’s digressions impede narrative flow. The result is a novel full of fits and starts, equally charming and frustrating. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Men and Apparitions by Lynne Tillman
Selected as "1 of 60 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2018" by Huffington Post
Selected as "1 of 101 Books to get excited about in 2018" by BookRiot
Named to "Most Anticipated Fiction of 2018" by Chicago Review of Books
Named "One of the Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2018" by Big Other
“Lynne Tillman’s much anticipated new novel after 12 years revolves around a cultural anthropologist who turns his anthropological lens on masculinity, art and memory. A profoundly wise and remarkably supple novel from an outstanding writer.” —Chicago Review of Books, "Most Anticipated Fiction of 2018"
“News of a new Tillman novel is worthy of raising a glass.” —The Millions, "Most Anticipated: The Great 2018 Book Preview"
“Lynne Tillman is her established sui generis self. . . . This book is compelling and bracing and you read many sentences twice to get all the juice there is in them.” —Norman Rush, author of Mating and Subtle Bodies
“A timely . . . exploration of modern masculinity . . . There is much to admire . . . Charming.” —Publishers Weekly
“No one anywhere writes more vibrantly and astutely into the gut of culture than Lynne Tillman. I always want to eat her books because her language is profoundly embodied. She is my secular art angel, my intellectual and creative hope, my full-blown galaxy. In Men and Apparitions, readers take a ride on the back of Zeke Hooper through culture, masculinity, art, being, and knowing—like entering a language-and-experience kaleidoscope.” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Misfit's Manifesto and The Chronology of Water

“A powerful disquisition on memory, media and melancholia.”
—Tom McCarthy, author of Satin Island and Remainder

“As a steadfast Lynne Tillman fan, I am grateful for her authentically weird and often indescribable books. She gives me permission to continue to try to write such work myself.” —Sarah Manguso, author of 300 Arguments and The Guardians
“Lynne Tillman's first novel in a dozen years crackles with pent-up energy. Brimming with her trademark wit and vibrancy, Men and Apparitions is a confirmation of a sadly under-acknowledged truth: Lynne Tillman is a genius.” —Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books (Point Reyes Station, CA)
Praise for Lynne Tillman
“Lynne Tillman has always been a hero of mine — not because I ‘admire’ her writing, (although I do, very, very much), but because I feel it. Imagine driving alone at night. You turn on the radio and hear a song that seems to say it all. That’s how I feel.” —Jonathan Safran Foer
“Lynne Tillman’s writing is bracing, absurd, argumentative, and luminous. She never fails to exhibit her unique capacities for watchfulness and astonishment.” —Jonathan Lethem
“Like an acupuncturist, Lynne Tillman knows the precise points in which to sink her delicate probes. One of the biggest problems in composing fiction is understanding what to leave out; no one is more severe, more elegant, more shocking in her reticences than Tillman.” —Edmund White
Praise for The Complete Madame Realism (2016)
“The discursive narratives of the Madame Realism stories mimic the experiences of museum going and sightseeing and have a disjunctive quality that resembles the fragmentary novels of Renata Adler and the essayistic miniatures of Lydia Davis. It’s remarkable that Tillman has created her own genre. It doesn’t seem to me a genre many could profitably duplicate.” —Christian Lorentzen, New York magazine
Praise for Someday This Will be Funny (2011)
“Gorgeously at ease and technically virtuosic . . . Tillman is simply a terrific prose stylist whose work should have wide appeal.” —New York Times Book Review
Praise for American Genius, A Comedy (2006)
“To read Tillman’s tightly woven novel, which meshes inner and outer realms as well as past and present, is to enter into an intense relationship, a communion with another spirit, perhaps with some sort of genius. An involvement that, like all forms of heightened attention, be it friendship, love, hate, or pursuits intellectual or creative, is demanding and bewitching, harrowing and bemusing, revelatory and transforming.” —Donna Seaman, Bookforum
“[F]lawed, beautiful, sacred, insane.” —George Saunders

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