Thrilled to Death: Selected Stories

people fall in and out of love. They go round the Wonder Wheel, and round the carousel. They are entranced by light and shocked by violence. Paige Turner, whose life is changed by what occurs that day, describes it like this: “That carnival deranged me, rearranged me maybe.” That’s what Tillman’s writing does—it deranges and rearranges. You keep go

To deny progress when the subject is the mind is to court comedy as well as tragedy. Tillman is one of our most unsentimental and yet playful writers, which makes me think that the two must somehow go together—that it’s only when we take the measure of the absolute shit we are in, here in twenty-first-century America, and when we reject the pablum

The wretched inherit what no one wants.