Lynne Tillman peels back the sod and soil of the short story form, revealing at each root a messy tangle of minds made obsessive and listless, of bodies rejoicing, and recoiling. The stories inSome Day This Will Be Funny marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman, author ofAmerican Genius, presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators by turn infamous and nameless shift within their own skin, struggling to unknot reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus, then cool, twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle, quotation, and haiku bounce between lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillman's preferred subject: the unsettledmind. Collectively, these stories own a conscience shaped by oaths made and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by love's shifting chartreuse. They traffic in the quiet images of personal history, each one a flickering sacrament in danger of being swallowed up by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking tickets shoved in the glove compartment, a little black book hidden from a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planter stuffed with flowers to keep out the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned with candor and animated by fits of wordplay and invention stories that affirm Tillman's unshakable talent for wedding the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence, defying genre and defining experimental short fiction. | Someday This Will Be Funny by Lynne Tillman, Paperback | Indigo Chapters