‘I think: Protect me from people who want to protect me; but more, save me from people who know what upsets others.’ – Lynne Tillman

Issue 6 of The Happy Hypocrite challenges the restraining notions found in art and writing about who and what can and cannot speak. What can and cannot be said or thought. In part a response to Kafka – to that which we don’t know has damaged us – freedom is presented as an important and urgent concept, and a complicated word, in which and beside which hypocrisy also resides. (Hypocrisy can be construed as a freedom). The Happy Hypocrite offers its pages to ingenious fictional, nonfictional, and visual responses to the various meanings of ‘freedom’.

There is a range of new contributions, from Gregg Bordowitz, Paul Chan, Gabriel Coxhead, Lydia Davis, Yasmine El Rashidi, Chloé Cooper Jones, James Jennings, Allison Katz, Robin Coste Lewis, the late Craig Owens, Sarah Resnick, Ranbir Singh Sidhu, Abdellah Taïa, an interview between Lynne Tillman and Thomas Keenan, a cover by Susan Hiller, and archival material from Paranoids Anonymous Newsletter.

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer and critic based in New York. Her sixth novel, Men and Apparitions, was published by Soft Skull Press 2018; Peninsula Press (UK) 2020; her previous novel, American Genius, A Comedy, was said to be, by The Millions, one of the best books of the new millennium. Other novels include Haunted Houses and No Lease on Life, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in Fiction. Her most recent collection of stories and essays, her fifth, is The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories (Semiotexte). Her stories and essays appear frequently in magazines and artists’ books/museum catalogues, most recently: on Stephen Shore, On Kawara, Anne Collier, Andy Warhol, Susan Hiller, Laurie Simmons, Steve Locke, Amy Sillman, and Kaitlin Maxwell et al. She lives in New York.