Motion Sickness

For the narrator of Motion Sickness, life is an unguided tour, populated with hotels, art, strangers, books, and movies. Adrift in Europe in the late 1980s, she improvises a life and a self. In London, she’s befriended by an expatriate American Buddhist and her mysterious husband, who may be following her. In Paris, she discovers Arlette, an art historian obsessed with Velazquez's painting “Las Meninas.” In Barcelona, she is befriended by two generations of Germans, pre- and post-World War 2. She tours the hill towns of Italy, in a London taxi, with two surprising Englishmen, brothers in pursuit of art and Henry Moore. And everywhere she goes she collects postcards.

Lynne Tillman (New York, NY) is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her last collection of short stories, This Is Not It, included 23 stories based on the work of 22 contemporary artists. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1998) which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast in Doubt (1992), Motion Sickness (1991), and Haunted Houses (1987). The Broad Picture (1997) collected Tillman’s essays, which were published in literary and art periodicals. She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.