Amor Towles

From the bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility, a richly detailed and sharply drawn collection of stories set in New York and Los Angeles The millions of readers of Amor Towles are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories set in New York City and a novella in Los Angeles. The New York stories, most of which are set around the turn of the millennium, take up everything from the death-defying acrobatics of the male ego, to the fateful consequences of brief encounters, and the delicate mechanics of comprise which operate at the heart of modern marriages. In Towles’s novel, Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September, 1938, with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood” describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself—and others—in the midst of Hollywood’s golden age. Throughout the stories, two characters often find themselves sitting across a table for two where the direction of their futures may hinge upon what they say to each other next. Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting historical fiction.

Fictions

Table for Two

Cassandra Tang

After all, isn't a boom just a very large paintbrush?

The craft of writing demands all the specialized training and physical stamina of a blacksmith. The serious writer sweats at the forge of his imagination while hammering out sentences on the anvil of language, and so on.

But as two bottles of wine harvested from the same vineyard in different years are at once similar and distinct, just so two signatures by the same person scrawled at different times are both reconizable as coming under which they are penned. Thus the perfect rendition of a signature requires not simply a mastery of the signatory's underlying calligraphic style, but an understanding of his or her state of mind at a given moment in time. 

I received a fragment measuring three inches square. And what had once held pride of place at the head of a patriarch's dining room was now a curiosity sitting on a living room table between a jade tortoise and a snuffbox. 

There is some measure of anxiety to be expected when one is on the verge of attaining a long-held dream. One cannot help but worry that the physical reality will fail to live up to the splendors of the imagination. 

Table for Two quotes

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