An incomparable storyteller serves up an enchanting concoction of art, love, and longing.
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE
An incomparable storyteller serves up an enchanting concoction of art, love, and longing
In fifteen masterful stories, Frederic Tuten entertains questions of existential magnitude, pervasive yearning, and the creative impulse. A wealthy older woman reflects on her relationship with her drowned husband, a painter, as she awaits her own watery demise. An exhausted artist, feeling stuck, reads a book of criticism about allegory and symbolism before tossing her paintings out the window. Writing a book about the lives of artists he admires—Cezanne, Monet, Rousseau—a man imagines how each vignette could be a life lesson for his wife, the artist he perhaps admires the most.
Whether set in Tuten’s beloved Lower East Side, Rome’s Borghese Gardens, or a French seaside resort, these stories shift seamlessly between the poignancy of memory into the logic of fairytales or dreams, demonstrating Tuten’s exceptional ability to transmute his passion for art and life to the page.
Praise for The Bar at Twilight
“Heady and elegant. . . . The work of a gifted, resourceful writer: an old master.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Heartfelt. . . . No matter whether Tuten is chronicling the creative or romantic lives of his characters, he renders their struggles with a sense of hope.” —Publishers Weekly
“Showcase[s] the deep desire to connect.” —Foreword Reviews
“Frederic Tuten’s stories are filled with art, dreams, yearning, and a past that he captures beautifully and deftly and then lets go. The Bar at Twilight is a wonderful, evocative collection.” —Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings and The Female Persuasion
“The music of Tuten’s prose speaks to my heart. His inimitable, imaginative, witty, romantic stories continue to haunt me.” —David Gilbert, author of The Normals and & Sons
Select Praise for Frederic Tuten
“Courageous, adventurous, intelligent and highly original.” —American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Writing Citation
“[An] exceptional writer . . . elegant and always intelligent in his spiritual accounting.” —Los Angeles Times
“Splendidly subversive. . . . Tuten whittles away at the conflicting emotions separating us from our ideal selves and shows us how little of our destinies we control.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“[Tuten’s] literary output has always been unpredictable and fresh.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
