No Lease on Life

No Lease on Life

No Lease on Life

No Lease on Life

Paperback(Second Edition)

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Overview

A National Book Critic Circle Award Finalist, No Lease on Life hannels the rage, filth, anguish, and the bust-a-gut hilarity of pre-gentrified New York.

The New York of Lynne Tillman's hilarious, audacious fourth novel is a boiling point of urban decay. The East Village streets are overrun with crooked cops, drug addicts, pimps, and prostitutes. Garbage piles up along the sidewalks amid the blaring soundtrack of car stereos. Confrontations are supercharged by the summer heat wave. This merciless noise has left Elizabeth Hall an insomniac. Junkies roam her building and overturn trashcans, but the landlord refuses to help clean or repair the decrepit conditions. Live-in boyfriend Roy is good-natured but too avoidant to soothe the sores of city life. Though Elizabeth fights for sanity in this apathetic metropolis, violent fantasies threaten to push her over the edge. In vivid detail, she begins to imagine murders: those of the "morons" she despises, and, most obsessively, her own. Frightening, hilarious, and wholly addictive, No Lease on Life is an avant-garde sucker-punch, a plea for humanity propelled by dark wit and unflinching honesty. Tillman's spare prose, frank, poignant and always illuminating, captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in America's toughest, hottest melting pot.

"She's a character who stays with you after you put the book down—a creature of occasional dark impulses, intermittent grumpiness and perennial willingness to pull up her socks and deal. And, oddly enough, you're also left with a sense of Tillman's paradoxical, contentious affection for New York in all its epic exasperatingness.”—New York Times Book Review

"Both entertaining and unnerving. . . If fiction is a mirror that shows the life and slime of our times, then this writer has her finger on the wavering pulse of our century at it’s closing."—Time Out

"As energetic and raunchy as a New York street”—San Francisco Chronicle

“A funny, frightening, and utterly brilliant tour de force.”— Bay Area Reporter


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781935869016
Publisher: Cursor
Publication date: 10/26/2021
Edition description: Second Edition
Pages: 230
Product dimensions: 6.25(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels are Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; American Genius, A Comedy; and Men and Apparitions. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore; Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.; and What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her most recent short story collections are Someday This Will Be Funny and The Complete Madame Realism. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writing Fellowship. Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at The Universityof Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Arts’ Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program in New York. She lives in Manhattan with bass player David Hofstra.


Eileen Myles (they/them) came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet, subsequently novelist, public talker and art journalist. A Sagittarius, their 22 books include For Now, evolution, Afterglow, I Must Be Living Twice/new & selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. In 2019 they wrote and directed an 18-minute super 8 film, The Trip, a puppet road film. See it on youtube. Eileen is the recipient of a Guggenheim, a Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, 4 Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2016, they received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. In 2019 Myles received a poetry award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. In 2020 they got the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.

Read an Excerpt

In jail, after she'd murdered the moron, she'd be given one phone call, but only after she'd demanded it. She's gonna lawyer up, a sleek cop would whisper to his partner, the beer-bellied one. Elizabeth didn't know who she'd phone from jail. Roy would think it was a joke. She didn't have a lawyer.

I have the right to remain silent. I have the right to remain single. I have the right to live with someone. I have the right to have a lawyer. I have the right to be sad. I have the right to be stupid. I have the right to be happy when other people are miserable. I have the right to make one telephone call.

Silently Elizabeth gave herself a Miranda warning. You aren't Latin, you aren't going to wiggle your hips for money and wear fruit on your head, you aren't going to turn yourself in to the authorities, even though you are guilty. You will try to destroy the authority within. You are not going to destroy yourself. You will sleep tonight. You are going to quit your job. You are going to tell the fat man off. You are going to tell her to leave you alone.

A car alarm shrieked. The block's wake-up call. Elizabeth flipped over on the couch. She covered her ears with her hands. The alarm screeched, wailed, pulsated, pounded. It demanded and sounded like inevitability. It was torture. There were fewer car alarms. No one paid attention to them because they cried wolf.

The chimes on the church across the street rang dully a few minutes after the hour. 8 A.M.

Her friend used to keep a dozen eggs on his windowsill. When a car alarm went off under his window, especially when he was sick and couldn't sleep, he was always ready to toss eggs. He was tall and had long arms. She never asked him if he hit a car. It was too late to ask. He was dead.

Elizabeth watched the clock tick silently while the car alarm screamed. If one of her foes saw her throw eggs, and that foe owned the car or knew the person whose car it was, if the young super caught her doing it, it could mean trouble for her on the block. She worried about retaliation.

Cops didn't respond to car alarms. She didn't want to think about her dead friend. If she phoned the cops, they'd say they were sending a car. They always said that.

Being alive was its own reward.

Roy was sleeping. So was Fatboy. The alarm clock rang. Unconscious, Roy reached for it. He had a hard time finding it on the floor. He did and shut it off. He was still in Roy's underworld. The car alarm stopped. Heavy feet stomped up the stairs. Doorbells buzzed. Their doorbell. Twice. Rebellious, resigned, Elizabeth grunted and crossed the room. She walked to the broken clothes closet. She was naked. She pulled on her thickest robe. It was the Con Ed man.

The Con Ed man always rang twice. He appeared regularly, once a month. Depending on how eager he was to finish his day, which was the beginning of her day, he woke her at 7, 8, or 9 A.M. She'd put on her robe—he'd be shouting, CON ED CON ED CON ED, buzzing everyone's doorbell—and she'd let him in. He'd beam his flashlight at the meter, he'd punch in the numbers on his blue electronic notepad. Then he'd leave.

Elizabeth wondered how he felt about people in general, what kind of feelings he had about waking everyone, if he did, and how he felt about seeing people in semiconscious states, in their ratty robes, or half-naked, and whether he wanted the job so that he could see people like that. She wondered if his job made him like people more or less.

Elizabeth yelled, OK, wait a second. Her nakedness was covered. She opened the door to Con Ed. It was 8:30 A.M.

—You're late, she said.

He grinned and flashed his light at the meter, punched in the numbers. He appeared sheepish. He bent his head down as he walked out the door. He always lowered his head. He was tall, not as tall as her dead friend. Elizabeth shut the door behind him.

In the hospital her dead friend said to his mother, I'm at peace, then he shut his eyes, went to sleep, and left the world in the early morning of an Independence Day.

The Con Ed man shouted again, CON ED CON ED. Some tenants never opened their doors to him. He probably didn't take it personally, unless he was paranoid. Some tenants figured that the amount of gas and electricity Con Ed estimated was less than what they actually used. Those tenants received an official letter. Con Ed insisted upon reading their meters.

Elizabeth switched on the radio—we'll give you the world, 1010 WINS. She turned the volume low. The radio muttered fitfully. She put a pot of water on the stove. A thread dangled from the gas pipe. It hung there petulantly. It'd been there for half a century. It was there because if there was a gas leak, you could put a match to the thread and then explode.

Roy said she used too much toilet paper. She couldn't accept his leaving the seat up. After years of living with him, she still didn't understand him. She once had a boyfriend who didn't use toilet paper when he pissed, like Roy and other men, but his penis leaked. It left a wet spot on his pants. He had an operation on his penis, performed by his surgeon father. Later, he went to a therapist for a long time. Elizabeth broke up with him three years before Roy came along. She saw him on the street every once in a while. He looked insane.

She switched off the news. She turned on Courtney Love who sang morosely, "I make my bed, I lie in it." She had a right to be miserable. Everyone did.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"She's a character who stays with you after you put the book down—a creature of occasional dark impulses, intermittent grumpiness and perennial willingness to pull up her socks and deal. And, oddly enough, you're also left with a sense of Tillman's paradoxical, contentious affection for New York in all its epic exasperatingness.”—New York Times Book Review


"Both entertaining and unnerving. . . If fiction is a mirror that shows the life and slime of our times, then this writer has her finger on the wavering pulse of our century at it’s closing."—Time Out


"As energetic and raunchy as a New York street”—San Francisco Chronicle

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