Lynne Tillman: Paying Attention

By Lynne Tillman. Edited and with an introduction by Elizabeth Schambelan

Forthcoming March 2026

From award-winning novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman, Paying Attention is the first collection of essays devoted to her incisive, singular reflections on art and culture.

Paying Attention gathers nearly seventy of the best and varied examples of Lynne Tillman’s writings in reference to art and culture published over the course of forty years. In essays that operate outside typical categories or genres, Tillman reflects on forms including film, painting, photography, poetry, and fiction, as well as notions of fame, originality, embodied viewing and thinking, collective activity, aging, illness, American identity, cultural politics, modernity, strangeness, and time.

Collected mainly from museum and gallery catalogues, artists’ books and monographs, her column in frieze, and magazines including Aperture and Artforum, these meditations on artists and writers, in the broadest sense of these labels, collide as a portrait of our cultural moment. Tillman’s inventive use of language and lateral thought, her ability to evoke conditions of the larger world in often just two thousand words on a specific artwork or individual, make her one of the most significant critics of our time. In a piece on the artist Robert Gober, she notes, “In writing on art, words reach for other words, phrases, idioms, and through them more images and ideas leap out.” 
 
In her introduction, Elizabeth Schambelan notes that a hallmark of Tillman’s writing alongside artists is an “elegant rendering of complexity,” and in approaching Tillman’s body of work and thought, Schambelan herself deftly layers the art, voice, and language of criticism. With cover art by Paul Chan, this collection is for ludic and serious readers alike.