Today we live in a “glut of images.” What does that mean? Men and Apparitions takes on a central question of our era through the wild musings and eventful life of Ezekiel Hooper Stark, cultural anthropologist, ethnographer, specialist in family photographs. We are the Picture People. I name us Picture People because most special and obvious about the species is, our kind lives on and for pictures, lives as and for images, our species takes pictures, makes pix, thinks in pix. What is behind the human drive to create, remake, and keep images from and of everything? What does it mean that we now live in a “glut of images?” Men and Apparitions takes on a central question of our era through the wild musings and eventful life of Ezekiel Hooper Stark, cultural anthropologist, ethnographer, specialist in family photographs. As Ezekiel progresses from a child obsessed with his family’s photo albums to a young and passionate researcher to a man devastated by betrayal in love, his academic fascinations determine and 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, this book that showcases Lynne Tillman not only as a brilliant original novelist but also as one of our most prominent thinkers on culture and visual culture today.

Grand and minute, elegiac and hilarious, Lynne Tillman expands the possibilities of the American novel in this dazzling read about a former historian ruminating on her own life and the lives of others--named a best book of the century by Vulture. In the hypnotic, masterful American Genius, A Comedy, a former historian spending time in a residential home, mental institute, artist’s colony, or sanitarium, is spinning tales of her life and ruminating on her many and varied preoccupations: chair design, textiles, pet deaths, family trauma, a lost brother, the Manson family, the Zulu alphabet, loneliness, memory, and sensitive skin--and what “sensitivity” means in our culture and society. Showing what might happen if Jane Austen were writing in 21st-century America, Tillman fashions a microcosm of American democracy: a scholarly colony functioning like Melville's Pequod. All this is folded into the narrator's memories and emotional life, culminating in a seance that may offer escape and transcendence--or perhaps nothing at all. This new edition of a contemporary classic features an introduction by novelist Lucy Ives.

A frustrated woman plots revenge on her super, landlord, the junkies in the hall, and the morons on the street throwing garbagecans at cars in this slice-of-life set in Manhattan.

Set in an eccentric community of expatriates living in Crete in 1975, Cast in Doubt is the story of Horace, an American gay man who writes mystery novels, and Helen, a secretive young woman he befriends. When Helen suddenly disappears, Horace's obsessive quest to find her reveals the nature of mystery and the uncertainties of his life. Tillman is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, Motion Sickness and Haunted Houses.

"Mothercare represents an investigation of the question of duty, or conscience, what we owe or want to provide to the people in our lives. . . For a reader, there’s something bracing about Tillman’s honesty, which transforms “Mothercare” from a record or a logbook into a work of art." —David Ulin, Los Angeles Times From the brilliantly original novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman comes MOTHERCARE, an honest and beautifully written account of a sudden, drastically changed relationship to one’s mother, and of the time and labor spent navigating the American healthcare system. When a mother’s unusual health condition, normal pressure hydrocephalus, renders her entirely dependent on you, your sisters, caregivers, and companions, the unthinkable becomes daily life. In MOTHERCARE, Tillman describes doing what seems impossible: handling her mother as if she were a child and coping with a longtime ambivalence toward her. In Tillman’s celebrated style and as a “rich noticer of strange things” (Colm Tóibín), she describes, without flinching, the unexpected, heartbreaking, and anxious eleven years of caring for a sick parent. MOTHERCARE is both a cautionary tale and sympathetic guidance for anyone who suddenly becomes a caregiver. This story may be helpful, informative, consoling, or upsetting, but it never fails to underscore how impossible it is to get the job done completely right.

"Mother Figured" is a wide-ranging study of apparitions and miracles of the Virgin Mary in the Philippines from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. While most analyses have read Marian revival as antimodern, de la Cruz demonstrates that its origins actually lie "within "secular modernity. She takes inspiration from one of Mary s titles that has grown in popularity in modern times Mary the Mediatrix to show how modern print and technological media enable and support the circulation of miraculous narratives and images. While thoroughly grounded in local tradition, the resurgence of Marianism in the Philippines is a subject of global relevance. De la Cruz portrays Filipino Catholics not as mere followers of the faith from the margins or from below but as guardians of orthodoxy and aggressive purveyors of their own sort of Christian universalism. In this sense, the book offers a timely analysis of the social and political implications of contemporary Christianity s shift to the Global South."

Our Lady of the Nations is a detailed and scholarly overview of the apparitions of Mary in 20th-century Catholic Europe. Chris Maunder discusses apparitions in general and how they are interpreted in Catholicism by, for example, Karl Rahner and Benedict XVI. The role of women and children as visionaries is considered, including issues concerning changing views of gender, children's spirituality, and the protection of minors. He covers cases that are well known and approved by the Church (Fatima, Beauraing, Banneux, and Amsterdam), others that are well known but not approved (such as Garabandal and Medjugorje), and many that are neither well known nor approved, such as those in Belgian Flanders or Nazi Germany in the 1930s, or in France, Italy, or Germany after the Second World War. Resources include academic studies of particular apparitions, some Catholic theological and devotional literature, and occasionally travel writing. There is also coverage of material in French which is not known to the English reader. Shrines and visionaries are believed to be indicators of the presence of Mary. In the visionary perspective, she has appeared in order to reassure her followers and to warn of divine judgement. Her messages echo doctrinal Catholic Mariology with some innovations, but also express a deep dissatisfaction with the events and trends of the 20th century, from communism to Nazism to liberalism and religious indifference. While the Marian cult evolves according to new templates for apparitions and developments in Mariology, the fundamental message of presence, consolation, and admonition remains constant.