{"product_id":"9781933368443","title":"American Genius, A Comedy","description":"\u003cp\u003eLynne Tillman’s previous novels have won her both popular approval and critical praise from such literary heavyweights as Edmund White and Colm Tóibín. With \u003ci\u003eAmerican Genius,\u003c\/i\u003e her first novel since 1998's \u003ci\u003eNo Lease on Life,\u003c\/i\u003e she shows what might happen if Jane Austen were writing in 21st-century America. Employing her trademark crystalline prose and intricate, hypnotic sentences, Tillman fashions a microcosm of American democracy: a scholarly colony functioning like Melville’s \u003ci\u003ePequod\u003c\/i\u003e. In this otherworld, competing values — rationality and irrationality, generosity and selfishness, love and lust, shame and honor — collide through a witty narrative, cycling through such disparate tropes as skin disease, chair design, and Manifest Destiny. All this is folded into the narrator’s memories and emotional life, culminating in a séance that may offer escape and transcendence — or perhaps nothing. Grand and minute, elegiac and hilarious, Lynne Tillman expands the possibilities of the American novel in this dazzling read.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Soft Skull Press, Inc.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47048344502512,"sku":"9781933368443","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781933368443_p0.jpg?v=1763784176","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781933368443","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}