In The Madame Realism Complex , Tillman's first collection of sly, wry, and influential essays on art and culture are combined with a group of short stories and a novella called To Find Words , all previously unpublished in book form. Through the character of "Madame Realism," Tillman blends fiction, theory, character, and art object as she wanders through the halls of Western culture surveying with desire and disgust its great art, monuments, and its notions: Ellis Island, Renoir's paintings, Sigmund Freud, Luther Burbank, and the very idea of "fake."

Along the way, Tillman uses grammatical twists, comic insight, and luscious language to throw life, culture, and art a fastball, inventing a new game with each line and making the familiar uncanny.