<DIV>Lynne Tillman's previous novels have won her both popular approval and critical praise from such literary heavyweights as Edmund White and Colm Tóibín. With <i>American Genius,</i> her first novel since 1998's <i>No Lease on Life,</i> 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 <i>Pequod</i>. 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.</div>