In No Lease on Life, Lynne Tillman takes on Manhattan - the East Village, anyway - and the comedies and tragedies of urban life. Elizabeth Hall is having terrible thoughts. It's 5:00 A.M., and she can't sleep. She's sitting at her window, ready to kill. She's watching the morons on the street smashing bottles, flipping garbage cans, and vomiting. A shady man's sitting in his window, watching her. Jeanine's in a doorway, turning a trick for the price of a rock.

Written with a paranoid's startling clarity, No Lease on Life, twenty-four unpredictable hours in the life of a woman and a city, is brilliant, dark, and desperately funny. There's also Gisela, an aging beauty who's sure the Swiss government is out to get her; Hector, the building super, who can't throw anything out; and her boyfriend, Roy, who just wants her to get away from the window.