Wordplay, Weirdness and a Guest Appearance by Clint Eastwood

THRILLED TO DEATH: Selected Stories, by Lynne Tillman

Lynne Tillman is an emissary from a vanishing literary culture that you want to describe as “downtown,” regardless of where she actually lives. Manhattan, according to her book bio, but with a bassist, not a banker — as so many downtowners are today.

Nothing staying the same is a big Tillman theme, minus any nostalgic gauze. “I don’t make good use of time,” one of her meta-narrators says in “Thrilled to Death,” a thorough if not complete selection of her short stories. “I waste a lot of it, and it wastes me.”

Tillman’s style is spare and spiky. She is a jill-of-all-genres, having written novels and criticism and oral histories of Andy Warhol and Books & Company, the dearly departed Upper East Side bookstore next to, and bullied out by, the old Whitney Museum. Her last book, “Mothercare,” was a long autobiographical essay, an unsentimental education in managing the decline of a problematic parent.

“Thrilled to Death” is dedicated to Tillman’s late father. Its contents, which date from the 1980s to the present, were selected and arrayed by the author in what she calls “associative” order.

The lack of dates keeps the reader on high alert, not so much on her toes as afloat out of time, as if in a dream. And Tillman’s characters teem with dreams. “Dreams, the mind’s gifts, can be sweeter than anything reality offers, and they satisfy me more than sex,” thinks the protagonist of “The Undiagnosed,” who shows up at a masquerade party wearing her neurotic, dead dad’s suit. Another guest is dressed as a rose, “his penis … a thorn in his side.”

Clint Eastwood is at the party, too. “It’s not a good time to be a man,” he tells our heroine. Their small talk is perfectly natural, philosophical and hilarious.