CANR

• The Lincoln Highway ( novel) Viking (New York, NY), 2021
• Table for Two ( fiction collection) Viking (New York, NY), 2024

1. Table for two : fictions LCCN 2023049040 Type of material Book Personal name Towles, Amor, author. Main title Table for two : fictions / Amor Towles. Published/Produced [New York] : Viking, 2024. Projected pub date 2404 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9780593296387 (e-book) (hardcover) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. The sun also rises LCCN 2021037338 Type of material Book Personal name Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961, author. Main title The sun also rises / Ernest Hemingway ; introduction by Amor Towles. Published/Produced New York : Penguin Classics, 2022. ©2022 Projected pub date 2112 Description 1 online resource ISBN (paperback) (hardcover) 9780525508274 (ebook) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 3. The Lincoln highway LCCN 2021024466 Type of material Book Personal name Towles, Amor, author. Main title The Lincoln highway / Amor Towles. Published/Produced [New York] : Viking, [2021] Projected pub date 2110 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9780735222373 (ebook) (hardcover) Item not available at the Library. Why not?

• Amor Towles website - https://www.amortowles.com/

  Born and raised in the Boston area, Amor Towles graduated from Yale and received an MA in English from Stanford. Having worked as an investment professional for over twenty years, he now devotes himself full time to writing in Manhattan, where he lives with his family. His novels Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, and The Lincoln Highway, and his collection of shorter fiction Table for Two have all been New York Times bestsellers, have collectively sold more than eight million copies, and have been translated into more than forty languages. Both Bill Gates and President Barack Obama included A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway on their annual book recommendation lists.

  Rules of Civility (2011) was a New York Times bestseller and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of the year. The book’s French translation received the 2012 Prix Fitzgerald.

  A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years and was named one of the best books of 2016 by the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR. In 2024, Paramount+ released a mini series based on the novel which stars Ewan McGregor.

  The Lincoln Highway (2021) debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The book is being adapted as a feature film by Warner Brothers with Chris Storer, the creator of “The Bear”, writing and directing.

  Table for Two (2024), a collection of six short stories and the novella “Eve in Hollywood”, was a New York Times bestseller.

  Towles’s short stories have appeared in the Paris Review (#112), Granta (#148), British Vogue, and Audible Originals.

  Towles wrote the introduction to Scribner’s 75th anniversary edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night , the Penguin Classics edition of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and the Vintage Crime edition of Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse.

  Towles served as the selecting editor of the 2024 O. Henry Prize, choosing the year’s twenty best short stories. His essay on short fiction is included in the collection of the twenty winners: The Best Short Stories 2024: The O. Henry Prize Winners.

  “As for Clothing”, Towles’s essay on Walden, appears in the anthology Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau.

  Access to a few of his essays can be found in the Other Writing section of this website.

  For those who did not get to attend one of the events for THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY, you can watch my full speech here in which I discuss my novel, the history of the highway, and my writing process in some detail. If you prefer, you can watch me in conversation about the book with Ann Patchett, Erik Larson, Ken Burns, John Grisham or Richard Russo.

  Below are my answers to some common questions.

  When you finished A Gentleman in Moscow, why did you choose to write The Lincoln Highway next?

  When I finish writing a novel, I find myself wanting to head in a new direction. That’s why after writing Rules of Civility—which describes a year in the life of a young woman about to climb New York’s socioeconomic ladder—I was eager to write A Gentleman in Moscow—which describes three decades in the life of a Russian aristocrat who’s just lost everything. The Lincoln Highway allowed me to veer again in that the novel focuses on three eighteen-year-old boys on a journey in 1950s America that lasts only ten days.

  The reason I make a shift like this is because it forces me to retool almost every element of my craft. By changing the setting, the era, and the cast of characters, I also must change the narrative’s perspective, tone, and poetics so that they will be true to these people in this situation at this moment in time. Similarly, by changing the duration of the tale—from a year to thirty years to ten days—the structure, pacing, and scope of thematic discovery all have to change.

  Can you tell us something about the origin of the story?

  I always start with a very simple idea, a conceit that has popped into my head and which can be described in a sentence. In the years that follow, I’ll keep returning to the idea, picturing the characters, the settings, the events, eventually filling a few notebooks while slowly gaining an understanding of the story as a whole. So, when I sit down to write the first chapter of a book, I’ve spent years imagining it already. (The adjacent photograph shows some of the notebooks I was working in including one from July 2014 with the book’s original working title Unfinished Business.)

  Generally, I can remember where I was when I had the initial notion for a book. With Rules of Civility I was at a friend’s house on Long Island in 1990 looking at a collection of the portraits that Walker Evans had taken with a hidden camera on the New York City subways in the late thirties. With A Gentleman in Moscow, I was walking into a hotel in Geneva in 2008. In the case of The Lincoln Highway, I have no idea where I was or what I was doing. I only remember being struck—more than a decade ago—by the notion of an honorable young man being driven home from a juvenile work program to the family farm only to discover that two of his fellow inmates have stowed away in the warden’s car.

  Is the Lincoln Highway real?

  It certainly is. You can find my brief history of the highway here.

  Can you talk about the shifting points of view in the book?

  When I first outlined The Lincoln Highway, the plan was to describe the story from two alternating perspectives: Emmett’s (in the third person) and Duchess’s (in the first person). This seemed a natural way to juxtapose the two different personalities, upbringings, and moralities of the lead characters—and by extension, two different ways of being American.

  But once I was writing, the voices of the others characters began to assert themselves, making their own claim on the narrative, insisting that their points of view be heard. First it was Sally and Woolly, then Pastor John and Ulysses, and finally Abacus and Billy. Now that the book is done, it’s hard for me to imagine it could ever have been told from the perspectives of just Emmett and Duchess.

  So far, I haven’t used the omniscient narrator in my novels. Rather, I’ve either used the first person (as in Rules of Civility) or a third person which is an extension of the protagonist’s point of view, tone and vocabulary (as in A Gentleman in Moscow). In The Lincoln Highway, I use both of these techniques. The chapters of six characters are told in a third person that reflects their point of view and tone, while the chapters of Duchess and Sally are in first person. Duchess and Sally both presented themselves to me as first person narrators right from the start, and I trusted that. I suppose that’s because they have such strong and vocal personalities.

  Can you talk about the structure of the book?

  As a novelist and a reader, I’m very interested in the role that structure plays in story-telling. Both Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow were conceived with very specific structures in mind (the former spanning from one New Year’s Eve to the next, and the latter spanning thirty-two years with an accordion-like shape). With The Lincoln Highway, from the first I imagined a story told over ten days.

  When I began writing the book, it was laid out in sections titled Day One, Day Two, Day Three, and so on. But when I was about halfway through writing the first draft, I became frustrated. The book was feeling unwieldy, with sections that were cumbersome, slow, or off track. After dwelling for days on the draft’s shortcomings to no avail, I suddenly realized that the book wasn’t simply a story told over the course of ten days, it was a countdown. So, I went back to the beginning and began revising—having renamed the sections as Ten, Nine, Eight, and so on. This helped clarify for me what belonged in the story and how it should be told.

  When I renamed the sections as a countdown, I assumed I would eventually restore the Day One, Day Two, Day Three titles. But when I finished the first draft, it seemed to me that the reader deserved to have the same experience while reading the book that I had while writing it: of knowing that the story was not open-ended, but ticking down day by day to its inescapable conclusion.

  In some respects, The Lincoln Highway, seems to be a Bildungsroman in which the transition from youth to adulthood for the main characters is compressed from years into a matter of days. Can you comment on that?

  When children are young, the nuclear family is a very tight unit (even when it’s dysfunctional). The relationships between husband and wife, between parents and children, and among siblings are omnipresent, governing habits and behaviors, influencing perspectives and emotions. But when children come of age in their late teens and early twenties, the household begins to unwind naturally, even purposefully. As young adults go off to college, enter careers, and get married, their focus shifts away from the household in which they were raised toward a world that they must shape for themselves.

  The Lincoln Highway is certainly about this transition—in a concentrated fashion. Emmett, Duchess, Woolly and Sally are all in the process of moving on from the family structure in which they were raised to some unknown world of their own fashioning—with all the challenges and opportunities, all the insights and illusions that the transition implies.

  Can you talk about some of the movies that are mentioned in the book?

  Early in The Lincoln Highway, when Duchess observes Emmett allowing himself to be beaten up by Jake Snyder, he remarks that Emmett is like Alan Ladd in Shane, Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity, and Lee Marvin in The Wild One. When I was first drafting this scene, I came up with Duchess’s upside-down notion that sometimes the one being beaten up is the real “man”. These three films immediately popped into my head as good examples of the dynamic and I added them to Duchess’s reflections. But when I went back to review the passage, it occurred to me that I had no idea when these movies were made, and thus whether Duchess could even have seen them. As it turned out, they were all released in 1953—in April, August, and December, respectively—less than a year before the events in the story. So, not only could Duchess have seen them, together they provide us a revealing window into the America of 1954: a country still romanticizing the West, already mythologizing the Second World War, and beginning to grapple with a new generation of “wild” youth. The three movies also happen to be American classics and definitely worth a watch.

  Another focus of the novel seems to be about the contrasting ethics of the characters…

  The matter of ethics in the book is closely related to the youth-to-adulthood transition described above. When a young person sets out on their own, they will inevitably have to solidify some personal ethos by which they are going to live. I’m interested in the question of where this personal ethos comes from. To what degree does it spring from our community—from the shared traditions and mores that define our clan? Do our parents serve as an influence, or counter-influence in its formation? Does part of our ethos come to us in the form of stories, whether handed down or read in books? And to what degree do we fashion it on the fly based on our own instincts and experience?

  Can you describe your process?

  My process for writing The Lincoln Highway was very similar to my process for writing my other books. In each case, I designed the book over a period of years—ultimately generating an outline that details the settings, characters, and events chapter by chapter, from the opening pages right up to the final scene.

  Perhaps counter-intuitively, one of the reasons I outline with such care is to free up my imagination while I’m writing the book. Because I have a detailed outline in place, when I’m starting a chapter I don’t have to wonder what the setting or key events are going to be. Instead, I can focus on the psychological nuances of the moment, the poetry of the language, and whatever surfaces from my subconscious.

  While I’m writing my first draft, I don’t share my work. But once I’ve completed the draft and cleaned it up, I give it to my wife, my editor in New York, my editor in London, and a few friends, asking that they all give me feedback within a few weeks. I then use their varied responses to reconsider the book’s strengths and weaknesses and begin the process of revising. Generally, I will revise the book from beginning to end at least twice before it reaches the reader.

  Having said that you outline your books thoroughly, are there surprises that arise during the course of the writing?

  While I’m writing chapters, I am constantly revising the back half of the outline or adding to it, as I gain a better understanding of my story. But I’m also adapting to surprises that surface from the work.

  In the case of this novel, the single biggest surprise was the Lincoln Highway itself. When I conceived of the story, I had no idea that it existed. I stumbled across it as I was mapping out the route that the characters were going to take out of Nebraska. Once I learned the history of the highway—and that it extended from Times Square to San Francisco—I couldn’t believe my luck. Almost immediately, the Lincoln Highway reinforced or reshaped a number of the book’s themes and events.

  Another fortuitous discovery relates to the photograph that’s in the book. While I avoid doing applied research before writing a novel, I do like to do some research once my first draft is complete to sharpen details or identify new threads for possible inclusion. To that end, when I was finished writing the first draft of The Lincoln Highway, I decided to look at the front pages of the New York Times for the ten days on which my story takes place: June 12 to June 21, 1954. As I was reviewing them, I was amazed by a story on June 14th announcing that all activity in New York City would stop for ten minutes on the following day as part of a nuclear attack simulation. When I turned to the front page for June 15th to see what had happened, there was a photograph of Times Square all but abandoned. That the photograph should be of the very spot where the Lincoln Highway begins seemed a coincidence too great to ignore, so I added the chapter of Woolly reading the old headlines.

  Are there connections between The Lincoln Highway and your other books?

  Despite the fact that I like to go in new directions whenever I write a new book, there are always connections between my books. In The Lincoln Highway the biggest connection, of course, is the character Wallace “Woolly” Martin, the nephew of Wallace Wolcott from Rules of Civility.

  Late in The Lincoln Highway Woolly gives Billy an old officer’s watch that has been handed down through his family from generation to generation. While doing so, Woolly explains that the watch’s dial is black and numbers white (in an inversion of the typical watch face), so that the dial would be less likely to attract the eye of snipers. Attentive readers of my work will recognize this watch as the very one that appears in Rules of Civility. In that novel, when Wallace is getting ready to leave New York for the Spanish Civil War in the summer of 1938, he and Katey gather together Christmas presents for his family to be delivered in December. The last gift that Wallace prepares is this officer’s watch, which he takes from his wrist and wraps for his young nephew and namesake. The Wolcott’s camp in the Adirondacks also figures prominently in Rules of Civility as the retreat where Katey goes to meet Tinker in seclusion.

  Your premise could have been realized in many different decades. Why did you decide to set the story in 1954?

  I find this moment in American history fascinating, but less for what was happening than for what was about to happen.

  With the Korean War having concluded in July 1953, America was at peace in 1954; but the country’s entanglement in the Vietnam War was about to begin. Although America didn’t ramp up its full military presence in Vietnam until 1965, in November 1955, President Eisenhower deployed the Military Assistance Advisory Group. These were the American military personnel we sent to train South Vietnamese armed forces. It was the first step that would eventually lead to our full involvement in the war.

  The battle for civil rights in America is as old as the Union itself, but in 1954, the modern civil rights movement was about to begin. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, initiating the end of legal segregation and the concept of “separate but equal,” at least on paper. In the decade that followed would come Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat and the resulting Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Martin Luther King (1955), the lunch counter protests (1960), the Freedom Riders (1961), the March on Washington (1963), and countless other public actions culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

  In 1954, the “sexual revolution” was about to begin. It was in December 1953 that Hugh Heffner published the first issue of Playboy with an old nude of Marilyn Monroe serving as its centerfold—launching a new era of publicly acceptable pornography. That same year, the Kinsey Report on female sexuality was released, bringing private discussions of bedroom behavior into the public square. But the revolution would really take off when the Pill was approved in 1961, giving women and men the ability to engage in sexual activity with less concern over long term repercussions.

  In 1954, television and rock & roll, two of the greatest cultural influences of the 20th century, were about to take off. In 1950, there were only one million households in the US with a television set. By 1954, that had grown to 30 million and by 1959, 88% of US households would have at least one set. In those first ten years of television many of the lasting formats and idioms of the medium were defined from the evening news broadcast to the sitcom and from the soap opera to the late-night talk show.

  1954 saw the release of the first two hits of the Rock & Roll era: “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Big Joe Turner and “Rock around the Clock” by Bill Hailey and the Comets. (“Rock Around the Clock” would have a particularly large impact when it was chosen to accompany the opening credits of the 1955 movie The Blackboard Jungle, a drama about an inner-city high school, starring the young Sidney Poitier.) To give some sense of the world at the time, the top thirty songs at the end of 1953 according to Billboard included the likes of Nat King Cole, Patti Page, Eddie Fisher, Tony Bennett and three songs by Perry Como. Which is to say that pop music before 1954 was a crooners’ game. Fifteen years later, the Billboard charts would be dominated by the likes of the Beatles, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Steppenwolf, and Sly & the Family Stone.

  While Rock & Roll is often referenced as a complement to the rise in youth culture in America, I would argue that it was a fundamental cause of the modern youth movement. At no point in prior history did teenagers anywhere in the world have an effective means by which they could share their perspectives with each other. Rock & Roll was an art form created and performed by young people for young people with their own experiences, hopes, and complaints as its principal subject matter. Rock & Roll was the first public forum in which the young could assemble, express themselves, and rally each other in support of their own priorities. But as I say, all of this was about to happen.

  Finally, in 1954 the road culture of modern American was about to begin. In 1954, America had 6% of the world’s population and 60% of its cars, but the automobile was primarily used as a local convenience. When the Lincoln Highway was conceived by Carl Fisher in 1912, 90% of all roads in America were unpaved. In the 1920s, the federal government began investing in highways and established the first numbered routes, but long-distance roads remained fairly rudimentary for decades. It wasn’t until June 1956 with the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act that that the country began building the Interstate Highway System—the multilane, highspeed highways that crisscrossed the nation, supporting not only the transportation of goods, but of workers, vacationers, and the curious. In the decade that followed, Americans would make great use of the new roads. While in 1950, 450 million vehicle miles were travelled in the US, by 1965, that number had doubled. In 1954, Holiday Inn had only three locations, but it would have 500 ten years later, and 1000 by 1968. 1954 was the year that both McDonalds and Burger King were launched.

  So, while the great cultural shifts that defined America from 1955 to 1970 were not yet dominating the headlines in 1954, they were simmering just below the surface.

  Is Fettucine Mio Amore a real dish?

  A recipe from the book
  One of my best friends growing up was an Italian-American named Claudio, who lived in Milan. When we were boys in the 1970s and Claudio would come to New England for the summer, he would be horrified by the American insistence upon drowning all pasta in a thick red sauce. A household should serve pasta in twenty different ways, he would argue, and each preparation should highlight a few essential flavors through intensity rather than volume.

  Fettucine Mio Amore, the dish that Duchess makes for Emmett, Woolly, Billy, and Sally on their last night together, is an homage to my old friend and a favorite of the Towles family. Here’s the recipe:

  1/4 cup olive oil
  1 large or two small onions, halved and thinly sliced
  1 pound of smoked American bacon, cut crosswise into ¼ inch strips
  1 bay leaf
  3/4 cup dry white wine
  1 teaspoon oregano
  1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
  3/4 cup crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce (and not an ounce more!)
  ½ cup chicken broth
  ½ cup parmesan
  Fettuccine for four, preferably fresh, cooked until al dente
  In a reasonably deep saucepan, cook the onions in the olive oil until soft and translucent, then set the onions aside. In the same pan, fry the bacon with the bay leaf until the bacon is brown but not crisp. Pour off most, but not all of the bacon fat. Add back the onions, the white wine, and let simmer for a few minutes. Add the tomato sauce, chicken broth, oregano and pepper flakes, stir and let simmer another ten minutes. (Add a little more chicken broth as necessary, if the sauce is drying out.) Toss about 1/4 of the sauce with the cooked fettuccine and parmesan, divide the pasta on the plates, then spoon the rest of the sauce on top of the pasta. Serves four.

  What are you working on now?

  Something different.

  ANSWERS TO FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

  Why are the Duchess and Sally chapters written in first person, while the chapters of the other characters are written in third person?

  For an answer to this question, please see the question in the Q&A above that discusses the book’s shifting points of view.

  Why is the dialogue in the book indicated by em dashes rather than quotation marks?

  In my first novel, Rules of Civility, I also used em dashes instead of quotation marks.

  Quotation marks are designed to let an author insert little parenthetical observations or characterizations in the middle of dialogue:

  “I knew your father well,” he said soberly, “back in the early days of the war…”

  “Yes,” she said smoothing her skirt, “another cup of tea would be lovely…”



  By eliminating the quotation marks in Rules, I was forced to abandon these little clarifications and write conversation in such a way that the dialogue would do most of the work on its own. I also think it resulted in exchanges with a sharper delivery and quicker pace.

  It seemed natural to use them again in The Lincoln Highway for the same reasons.

  On page 456, when Woolly winds his watch sixteen times for six days in a row “on porpoise”, is that a typo?

  There are multiple words and phrases throughout the book which Woolly alters, such as “absotively” or “in the muddle” or “an undersight”. He uses the word “porpoise” in place of “purpose” twice in the book. The first time occurs on p.192 while he is recalling his Gettysburg address recitation: “For all intents and porpoises (as Woolly used to say) there are twelve sentences, not ten…” So no, this is not a typo. It is very much on porpoise.

  Why is “Dennis” in quotation marks?

  The quotation marks around Dennis’s name are also something of a Woollyism. I imagine that when Dennis first introduced himself to Woolly, he did so in a somewhat pompous fashion, and Woolly has called him “Dennis” ever since, imitating the pompous tone.

  Regarding the ending… (SPOILER ALERT)

  A number of readers have reached out with questions about Emmett’s intentions and culpability at the end of the book. Readers, of course, are welcome to draw their own conclusions. But here’s my take, for those who want it:

  As Billy is cleaning the library, Emmett has placed Duchess in the boat and set him adrift in order to buy himself some time. Noting the hole in the bow of the boat, Emmett has piled stones in the stern in order to keep the hole in the bow above the water line. As Duchess himself notes (when he comes to), all he need do is lean back and paddle slowly, in order to make it safely to shore. But when the five o’clock wind starts blowing (which Emmett could not have anticipated), Duchess can’t help himself and moves towards the bow with fateful repercussions. I suppose it’s worth noting that Duchess isn’t angry with Emmett in the last chapter because he recognizes the ingenuity of what Emmett has done, and he knows his own culpability in the final outcome.

  Some have wondered how Emmett will be able to live with the knowledge that Duchess has drowned; but Emmett is not likely to ever find out. For no one has any reason to suspect that Billy and Emmett were in the Adirondacks in the first place, and Duchess’s end will be viewed as an accident.

  Spoiler Alert: My answers below occasionally refer to key events in the stories. As a result, I’d recommend you read the stories first –Amor.

  Where do your short stories come from?

  My writing almost always begins with a simple premise or conceit. For my novels, the premise usually springs from my imagination with little connection to my personal experiences. But in the case of the New York stories in Table for Two most of them began with some small encounter I witnessed first-hand, and which I then found myself elaborating upon in my imagination.

  In my early thirties, for instance, my wife and I subscribed to a series of piano concerts at Carnegie Hall. As this was our first foray into New York’s high culture of classical music, we dressed up and treated ourselves to a nice dinner. But on the first night of the series, I realized the old man in the raincoat who was sitting next to me was illicitly recording the concert. I couldn’t get over the gall of it. When we attended the second concert in the series, there he was again with his raincoat and his recording device. I was so irked by what he was doing, I couldn’t even listen to the famous pianist on stage (Evgeny Kissin). Instead, I spent the whole concert fantasizing that I would report this scofflaw to security. Of course, I didn’t report him. But my fantasy of indignation grew into “The Bootlegger.”

  Around the same time, I was walking through Central Park and stumbled upon the area where roller skaters gather together to skate to disco, performing elaborate moves to the rhythm of the music. When I stopped to enjoy the spectacle, I noticed that one of the best skaters was a tall, aristocratic man in his sixties. His presence seemed so incongruous I found myself wondering who he was and whether his associates or family members knew of his pastime. These are the wonderings that led to “I Will Survive”.

  In a way, the origin of “The DiDomencio Fragment” dates back to my youth. As a boy, my grandparents, who were Boston Brahmins, lived in a large brick house in the neighboring town. The grand staircase leading to the second floor made a 180 degree turn at a landing. On opposites sides of the landing hung full length portraits dating from the 19th century of my grandfather’s grandparents.

  When I was around ten, my grandparents sold the large brick house and moved into a small clapboard one that was at least two hundred years old. Consistent with the Revolutionary era architecture in New England, this house had low ceilings and wainscoting throughout the first floor, two facts which precluded the hanging of full-length portraits. As a result, my grandfather—a practical man to the last—had the paintings cut in half, reframed, and hung in the dining room.

  Forty years later, I was in my office remembering those paintings, wondering wistfully what had happened to the legs of my ancestors. I found myself imagining a WASPy patriarch who, upon his death, had a beloved painting quartered, so that he could leave a portion to each of his four sons…

  You like to plan out your novels. Do you do the same thing with your short stories?

  I do. But, naturally, the planning process for a novel is very different from that of a short story. In a novel there are thousands of details spanning plot, character, setting, and theme which I may consider carefully in advance before writing the book. In a short story, I will still try to imagine all the key elements in advance, but these may amount to a handful.

  To what degree do your stories reflect your own life?

  None of the stories in the collection are about me or my family, per se. Even though the premises may have sprung from some personal event, the characters and their experiences are all invented. But inevitably, as I’m writing a story, I may make use of some detail from my life or from the realm of my interests.

  A good example of this is Percival Skinner’s discussion of the Annunciation as a painting in “The DiDomenico Fragment.” When my wife and I were married in the 1990s, we spent part of our honeymoon in Tuscany where we visited the Uffizi in Florence as well as an array of chapels and monasteries that showcased works from the Renaissance. While we were on that trip, I saw depictions of the Annunciation executed by a variety of the era’s greatest painters, and I was struck by how similar they were in design. They always seemed to have Mary on the right and Gabriel on the left; Mary holding a book and Gabriel a lily; Mary in a quasi-interior and Gabriel outside or in front of a window with a view, etc. This observation led to a small obsession. I began hunting out Annunciations from the Renaissance in museums around the world to see if they had a similar design—and for the most part, they did.

  While imagining the events of “The DiDomenico Fragment” I knew the patriarch would quarter a beloved painting, which would then be divided further by following generations. What I didn’t know is what the painting would be. Faced with such a quandary, I’ll often find myself pacing my office considering and discarding options. Then suddenly, the perfect solution will present itself. “Of course!” I said to myself, in this instance: “The quartered painting will be an Annunciation from the Renaissance and my narrator will be able to analyze the history of the Annunciations on my behalf.”

  A second example from “The DiDomenico” is the prank described by Percy to his young nephew, Lucas. As a boy, Percy and his cousin placed a garbage can on top of a flagpole, a stunt that is fairly difficult to achieve, and even more difficult to undo. When Percy was older, at a family party he sketched out the means of achieving this prank for Lucas’s father. Well, one summer when I was a boy, my roguish uncle Neddy sketched out the same design on a napkin during a cocktail party. Around one in the morning, my cousin, Mackie, and I succeeded in placing the garbage can on the flagpole. It took the fire department’s ladder truck to get the garbage can off again. Needless to say, Mackie and I were grounded.

  One more personal detail which crops up in the collection is the cameo made in the “Bootlegger” by the great British cellist Steven Isserlis.” I am not a big fan of social media, but upon occasion Instagram and Twitter have given me a gift by connecting me, unexpectedly, with someone I’ve admired from a distance. Steven is one such person. Having enjoyed each other’s work, we met through social media and ultimately became friends.

  So, having decided the characters in “The Bootlegger” would attend Carnegie Hall on four nights to hear four different virtuosos, I immediately thought that Steven should be one of them. He could appear with the instrument he played at the time, a Gaudagnini cello from 1745.

  I knew I wanted the culminating moment of the story to be the narrator hearing Steven play the prelude to the first of Bach’s Suites for Cello (in G Major) , as that piece has long been a favorite of mine. My choice of this piece proved fortuitous because around the same time Steven wrote a wonderful book called The Bach Cello Suites. What history of the suites appears in the story does so thanks to Steven.

  More importantly, I was able to give a draft of the story to Steven so that he could point out my musical errors. There were several, of course, but here’s my favorite: In the original version of the story, when Steven finishes the first half of the program, he glances at his wristwatch, realizes he’s a little ahead of schedule, and offers to play this piece by Bach. Upon reading the draft, Steven pointed out that he would never wear a wristwatch at a concert. “Because it would be distracting?” I asked. “No!” he replied. “Because the watch could damage the cello!”

  British cellist Steven Isserlis
  What is the history behind Eve in Hollywood?

  As a novelist, I’m a planner. I will spend several years laying out exactly what is going to happen in one of my books before I begin writing. Readers often ask me if I ever make changes to my outline, and if my characters ever interfere with my plans by taking matters into their own hands. The answer is yes to both questions, and Evelyn Ross is a perfect example.

  In my novel Rules of Civility, which is set in 1938, Eve Ross is the spirited and somewhat willful best friend of the narrator Katey Kontent. Late in the novel, after surviving a car accident and the dissolution of a relationship, Eve announces she’s leaving New York City and heading home to Indiana.

  But as I was writing the scene in which her train pulls into Chicago’s Union Station, where her parents were waiting, I realized that Eve would never go home to Indiana—and my narrative veered. Mr. Ross ends up calling Katey and saying that Eve never got off the train; that he had tracked down the conductor who informed him that at the last minute Eve had extended her ticket to Los Angeles.

  In the Epilog of the book, Katey tells us that the next she heard of Eve was in March 1939 when a friend gave her a gossip magazine with a photo of her old friend exiting the Tropicana Club on the arm of Olivia de Havilland.

  When I finished writing Rules of Civility, I had no desire to follow the lives of Katey or Tinker further. Everything that you needed to know about those characters, I felt, was in the book. What I did find myself wondering was what happened to Eve? To answer that question, shortly after Rules was published, I wrote a series of six interlinked short stories called “Eve in Hollywood” which gave readers a glimpse of her new life. When I shared the work, I would tell people that the volume, like its protagonist, was slim and enigmatic. It turned out to be too slim and enigmatic even for me! So, last year, I checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel and finally gave Eve the story she deserved.

  Can you tell us about the title of the collection?

  When I finished assembling this collection, it occurred to me that in most of the pieces, a critical moment involved a pair of family members or strangers facing each other across a kitchen table to confront some new reality in their lives. I wasn’t conscious of this while writing the stories, but it must have sprung from a conviction in my subconscious that our lives can often change materially due to a single conversation at a table for two.

  Are you involved in choosing the narrators for the audio books?

  Edoardo Ballerini, the primary audio narrator for TABLE FOR TWO
  I am. Typically, the publishing house will ask what I’m looking for in general. Based on my guidelines, they will do a search and present several alternatives for me to choose from. In the case of Table for Two, the casting of the narrators was relatively easy. Edoardo Ballerini, the accomplished actor and audiobook giant, had masterfully narrated the majority of The Lincoln Highway. It was a pleasure to have him narrate Table for Two as well. Our only problem was that in the collection there is one story narrated by a woman. But as soon as this issue was raised, I knew exactly who I wanted to narrate that story. J. Smith Cameron (of Succession fame) and I had become friends initially through Twitter, and then through a shared love of Martinis. I knew she would be perfect as Mary Elizabeth Harkness, the narrator of “The Bootlegger”

• The Steven Barclay Agency, Inc. - https://www.barclayagency.com/speakers/amor-towles

  Born and raised in the Boston area, Amor Towles graduated from Yale College and received an MA in English from Stanford University. His thesis at Stanford, a short story cycle called “The Temptations of Pleasure”, was published in 1989 in Paris Review No. 112. After working as an investment professional for over twenty years he now devotes himself full time to writing. His novels have collectively sold more than eight million copies and been translated into more than forty languages. Mr. Towles is the 2023 recipient of the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award.

  Mr. Towle’s new book is a collection of short stories titled Table for Two (Viking, April 2, 2024). An immediate bestseller, the New York Times called it “a winner,” and the Star Tribune said "[his] new book could be his best yet."

  Mr. Towles’s first novel, Rules of Civility, which was published in 2011, was a New York Times bestseller and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of 2011. The book has been translated into over 15 languages, its French translation receiving the 2012 Prix Fitzgerald. In the fall of 2012, the novel was optioned by Lionsgate to be made into a feature film.

  Mr. Towles’s second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, which was published in 2016, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over 52 weeks in hardcover and was named one of the best books of 2016 by the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR. The book has been translated into over thirty-five languages including Russian. An eight episode series starring Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead premiered on Paramount+/Showtime with the Guardian calling it “handsome and charming” and the Hollywood Reporter praising its “claustrophobic sumptuousness”.

  Mr. Towle’s third novel, The Lincoln Highway, debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list, and was a Today Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick, one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2021, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2021, was #1 on Amazon’s list of the Best Books of the Year, and was one of Bill Gates’ “5 great books for the summer.” The Lincoln Highway will be made into a movie adapted and directed by Christopher Storer for Warner Brothers.

  Mr. Towles is the author of the ebook You Have Arrived at Your Destination, part of Amazon's Forward collection. He is the guest editor for The Best Short Stories 2024 (Vintage, September 10, 2024). He also edited and wrote the introduction for The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023.

  Mr. Towles lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.

• Fantastic Fiction -

  Amor Towles
  USA flag (b.1964)

  Amor Towles was raised in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Yale College and received an M.A. in English from Stanford University where he was a Scowcroft Fellow. He is a principal at an investment firm in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife and two children. He is on the boards of the Library of America and the Yale Art Gallery.

  Genres: Literary Fiction, Mystery, Science Fiction, Historical

  Novels
  Rules of Civility (2011)
  A Gentleman in Moscow (2016)
  The Lincoln Highway (2021)
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  Collections
  Table for Two (2024)
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  Series contributed to
  Forward
  4. You Have Arrived at Your Destination (2019)
  thumb

  Best Mystery Stories of the Year
  3. The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023 (2023) (with Otto Penzler)
  aka Best Crime Stories of the Year 3
  thumb

  O. Henry Prize Stories
  The Best Short Stories 2024 (2024)

• Wikipedia -

  Amor Towles

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Amor Towles
  Towles in 2018
  Towles in 2018
  Born 1964 (age 60–61)
  Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
  Occupation Novelist
  Education Yale University (BA)
  Stanford University (MA)
  Period 2011–present
  Genre Literary fiction
  Notable works A Gentleman in Moscow
  Spouse Maggie
  Children 2
  Website
  www.amortowles.com
  Amor Towles (born 1964) is an American novelist. He is best known for his bestselling novels Rules of Civility (2011),[1] A Gentleman in Moscow (2016),[2] and The Lincoln Highway (2021).[3] Towles began writing following a career in investment banking.

  Early life and education
  Towles was born and raised in Boston, to Stokley Porter Towles, an investment banker at Brown Brothers Harriman and a philanthropist, and Holly Hollingsworth. His parents later divorced. He has a brother, Stokley Jr.; a sister, Kimbrough; and two stepbrothers.[4] When Towles was 10 years old, he threw a bottle with a message into the Atlantic Ocean. Several weeks later, he received a letter from Harrison Salisbury, then managing editor of The New York Times, who had found the bottle. Towles and Salisbury corresponded for many years afterward.[5]

  He graduated from Yale College and received a Master of Arts degree in English from Stanford University, where he was a Scowcroft Fellow. The thesis for his M.A. titled Temptations of Pleasure was published in The Paris Review in 1989.[6]

  Career
  After graduating from Yale University, Towles was set to teach in China on a two-year fellowship from the Yale China Association. However, this was abruptly canceled due to the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.[7] From 1991 to 2012, he worked as an investment manager and director of research at Select Equity Group in New York.[8][9]

  When Towles was a young man, he credited Peter Matthiessen, nature writer, novelist, and one of the founders of The Paris Review, as the primary inspiration for writing novels.[10] Towles' first novel, Rules of Civility, was successful beyond his expectations.[11]

  His second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, which was on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list for 59 weeks,[12] was a finalist for the 2016 Kirkus Prize for Fiction.[13] It was also longlisted for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award.[14] A television adaptation starring Ewan McGregor was released on Paramount+ in March 2024.[15]

  Towles' third novel, The Lincoln Highway, was published on October 5, 2021.[16] It was chosen by Amazon as the best book of 2021.[17] As of May 15, 2022, it had been on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list for 30 weeks.[18] In April 2024, Towles released a book of short fiction titled Table for Two.[6]

  Personal life
  Towles resides in Gramercy Park, Manhattan, New York City, with his wife Maggie, their son Stokley, and their daughter Esmé.[19] Towles is a collector of fine art and antiques.[19]

  Awards and honors
  2016 Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction
  Works
  Fiction
  Rules of Civility: A Novel. New York: Viking. 2011. ISBN 978-0-670-02269-4.
  Eve in Hollywood: A Penguin Special (collection of six interlinked short stories). Penguin. 2013. ISBN 978-1-101-63092-1.
  A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel. New York: Viking. 2016. ISBN 978-0-670-02619-7.
  You Have Arrived at Your Destination (novella). Forward. Vol. 4. Amazon Original Stories. 2019. ASIN B07VBCYTGR.[20]
  The Lincoln Highway: A Novel. New York: Viking. 2021. ISBN 978-0-7352-2235-9.
  Table for Two. Viking Press. 2024-04-02. ISBN 978-0-593-29637-0.[21][22][23]
  Essays
  "Channel a More Romantic Era of Transatlantic Travel" (2016)[24]

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  50 notable fiction books

  Book Tour: At home with Amor Towles
  The author of “A Gentleman in Moscow” and “The Lincoln Highway” guides us through his personal library.

  By John Williams
  Photographs by Jeenah Moon for The Washington Post

  May 18, 2024 at 8:13 a.m.
  The library in Amor Towles’s beautifully appointed home not far from Gramercy Park in Manhattan looks and feels like the Platonic ideal of the concept: tall windows, tasteful art on the walls, many comfortable seating options and well-ordered shelves filled with classic literature. Perfect for reading in, of course, but when I visited in March, Towles first wanted to talk about writing. This is the room where he composed, among other books, his acclaimed bestsellers “A Gentleman in Moscow” and “The Lincoln Highway.” (His newest, “Table for Two,” a collection of stories and a novella, was published last month.)

  Amor Towles sketched out ideas for his novel “The Lincoln Highway” in these notebooks, which he calls “design books.”
  Towles first brought out a few of what he calls the “design books” for his novels — notebooks that he fills with details for about four years before he starts officially writing. “I’m just trying to imagine: What happens? Who are the people?” he said. “Where are they from, what’s their personality? What are the settings? Who says what, and why? What are the tones?”

  Some of the notes he scribbles are longer and more fully realized than others, but Towles estimates that he writes 80 percent of what ends up in his fiction on a computer, once the handwritten design books have done their duty.

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  Towles consulted Intourist's “Pocket Guide to the Soviet Union” (1932) and Baedeker's “Russia” (1914) for “A Gentleman in Moscow.”
  Guides from the past
  To conjure all those details and tones, Towles partly and very happily relies on documents dating from the eras he writes about. His shelves still include classic travel guides to Moscow, including one published by Intourist in 1932 and a Baedeker guide from 1914. “Intourist was the Politburo-owned tourist agency of Russia,” Towles said, “and at one time its offices were in the Metropol Hotel [the primary setting of ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’]. I had street maps from the ’30s that I could look at. Part of it was to see how they described for the Westerner something that they were trying to impress them with, et cetera.”

  This photograph of Ewan McGregor, who plays the title character, was used in the TV adaptation of “A Gentleman in Moscow.”

  “I love old, weird reference,” says Towles, pointing to the multivolume New Standard Encyclopedia from 1931.
  A framed picture of Ewan McGregor, in character, used in the production of the recently released adaptation of “A Gentleman in Moscow,” sits on a shelf nearby. Towles said it appeared as part of a secret police file in the show: “You don’t even notice it on screen, but it’s tucked under a paper clip on top of the file.”

  A full encyclopedia set from 1931 is another treasure that combines pleasure and work for Towles. “I think it was 48 cents per book. My first novel, ‘Rules of Civility,’ happened to be set in 1938, and I thought: ‘This is great, I can check the population of New York City right there.’ I love old, weird reference.”

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  A treasured checklist
  Towles majored in literature as an undergraduate at Yale and took the few creative-writing courses the school offered at the time. When he was a sophomore, the experimental-fiction writer Walter Abish was a visiting professor.

  “At the end of the class,” Towles remembered, “he said to us: ‘All this has been great. I liked your work. I hope my comments have been helpful. But probably the most valuable thing I can do is give you a hundred books that I like.’ So he gave us this list. And because he was an avant-gardist, it was a lot of people who, at the age of 19, I had never heard of: Andre Breton, Barthelme, Beckett, Heinrich Böll … international writers, but all playing with form, that’s what he was interested in.”

  Towles immediately started checking for the recommended titles anytime he visited a used-book store. “I’d stack them up, and I’d read a novel a day off of his list,” he said. “That was a totally different kind of experience than studying Henry James or Shakespeare or Chaucer in the academy. A lot of these books [on Abish’s list] were not perfectly made. A lot of them are stabs at something.”

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  A copy of “Far Tortuga” by Peter Matthiessen, who offered a young Towles some early encouragement.
  Matthiessen, mentor and friend
  The year after Abish taught at the school, Peter Matthiessen arrived for a semester. Matthiessen was already a celebrated writer of both nonfiction (“The Snow Leopard”) and fiction (“At Play in the Fields of the Lord”). He singled out Towles’s work for praise and told the young writer, “I’m going to take your time here very seriously, and I hope that you’re going to take your time with me very seriously, too.” The encouragement was “a gift,” Towles said. The next year, Towles worked with him again, and the two struck up a long friendship.

  Towles laughed remembering Matthiessen’s underwhelmed reaction to the draft manuscript of “Rules of Civility” (“He didn’t know why I was writing a book set in 1938”), but when the book became a bestseller, the mentor wrote him a note of congratulations, saying that his sister had loved it and was thrilled to find her brother’s name in its acknowledgments.

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  Books on this shelf — by Karl Marx, Jane Jacobs and others — are part of what Towles calls his “big ideas” collection.
  New ideas, new language
  In addition to his fond remembrances of his formal education, Towles referred to himself more than once during the tour as a “reader-writer,” someone who is constantly refining each of those skills in a conscious conversation between them. He stopped at a shelf of books — the “big ideas” collection, kept together — by Augustine, Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and others. “What these things have in common for me is that [their authors] had to invent a new language to express their discovery. They weren’t doing the new version of something or doing a ‘spin’ on so and so. [Freud’s] ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ is a totally radical, weird book.”

  “Marx and the group around him, they invented that whole thing of, ‘There is no more time! Now is the time to make a decision!’ This sweeping, bold things in single-sentence paragraphs: ‘All people must …’ That’s electric. And you realize that you can apply that language in your novel. It’s doing something very different. I get very interested in how non-narrativists turn on language in the pursuit of a particular outcome, that I can then sort of use in some weird way.”

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  A first edition of “The Great Gatsby” once owned by Dorothy Ann Scarritt, who was Robert Oppenheimer's secretary at Los Alamos.
  Rare finds
  “Now you’re in the first-edition zone,” Towles said, opening the glass doors directly behind his writing desk. “And now you’re really into heroes: Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Conrad, Emily Dickinson.” (Towles also listed the Transcendentalists in this league; he was born and raised in the Boston area and said that “a lot of the personality aspects of Emerson and Thoreau are second nature to me.”)

  “This is kind of crazy, just time coming around the corner,” he said, pulling one modest-size blue book off the shelf. “This is a first edition of ‘The Great Gatsby.’ It was owned by Dorothy Ann Scarritt,” he noted, pointing to her signature inside the book. “This is August 1925. She later becomes famous because she is Oppenheimer’s secretary at Los Alamos. She’s like the second employee at Los Alamos; she’s there the entire time and she organizes his entire life. She’s involved with bringing everyone in, getting them set up.”

  Towles has long been a fan of Bob Dylan; his wife gave him a signed copy of the singer-songwriter's Nobel Prize lecture.

  A copy of “Swann’s Way” by Marcel Proust, signed by translator C.K. Scott Moncrieff to the novelist Joseph Conrad in 1922.
  Scarritt’s signature has a lot of company among Towles’s books. A signed copy of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize lecture — a small book nestled inside a larger case — was a gift from his wife. Towles is a longtime fan of Dylan’s and mentioned him in the same sentence as Rimbaud and T.S. Eliot, so when the singer received the Nobel in literature in 2016 to divided opinion, Towles was ecstatic. “It was not controversial for me at all.”

  Going back a century further, Towles took down a copy of Proust signed by its translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff, to Joseph Conrad in 1922.

  On a shelf across the room, Towles has another edition of Proust’s work, as well as several books about what he calls “Proust-y stuff” — “different things about Proust — Proust’s letters, paintings in Proust, the music of Proust …”

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  Writing by Marcel Proust shares a shelf with “Proust-y stuff,” as Towles calls it — studies of the author and his work.
  A long-running book club
  Proust also holds a place of honor in an intense book club that Towles has been in with three close friends for just over two decades. “We basically read a novel a month, and we do projects. And we do almost explicitly dead authors; occasionally we veer from that, but mostly it’s dead. We started with Proust. Twenty years ago, we read it as a team. That took longer. We didn’t do it over seven dinners [one per book], more like 14 — over a year and a half.”

  The club’s creation was inspired by Harold Bloom’s “Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?,” in which the literary scholar and critic pondered which writers he’d learned more from about the human condition: Plato or Homer? Freud or Proust?

  The Harold Bloom book that inspired Towles and a few friends to form a book club that focuses on dead authors.
  “I was turning 40 in like two months,” Towles said, recalling when he read Bloom’s book. “I thought, if I live to 80 and read a book carefully a month, that means I have 480 books left. And if that’s true, I better focus on books that you could reread at 20, 40 and 60 and learn something new. I was ranting about this to my friend Ann Brashares at a cocktail party, and she said, ‘I’m in.’ And we’ve been going ever since.”

  Given the size and ambitions of the books they normally choose, one of the friends recently suggested a “palate cleanser,” which led to “a dinner we called the Fitzgerald-Salinger Death Match. We realized that we’d all read ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ as children. So the question was: Which was better? We would reread both in a week and then come back and debate.” I later realized I had left Towles’s home without asking who won.

  correction
  An earlier version of this article misidentified the person who sent Peter Matthiessen a note after reading "Rules of Civility." It was Matthiessen's sister, not his daughter.

• El Pais - https://english.elpais.com/culture/2024-09-28/amor-towles-writer-more-books-have-been-sold-in-the-us-in-recent-years-than-ever-before-fiction-is-holding-its-own.html

  Amor Towles, writer: ‘More books have been sold in the US in recent years than ever before, fiction is holding its own’
  The novelist, author of the best-selling ‘A Gentleman in Moscow,’ recently published a book of short stories titled ‘Table for Two’
  Amor Towles
  The writer Amor Towles, pictured in his Manhattan home, on August 13, 2024.
  Corrie Aune
  María Antonia Sánchez-Vallejo
  María Antonia Sánchez-Vallejo
  New York - SEP 28, 2024 - 00:46 EDT
  Amor Towles, 59, is surprised when he’s asked what he would say to critics who, from time to time, announce the death of the novel. It doesn’t seem like the most relevant question for a best-selling writer like him, with millions of books sold around the world and a legion of readers, who fell in love with A Gentleman in Moscow (2016). It was his second novel: it catapulted him to fame and is now experiencing a resurgence, thanks to its recent adaptation into a Paramount+ series.

  “I was only marginally involved in the production. I didn’t write the script, I didn’t direct… I only had the credit of executive producer,” explains the Boston-born Towles, at his home in Manhattan. “So, it’s someone else’s, it’s not my work. I have no information about how it’s doing, although I think Ewan McGregor (who plays Count Rostov, the protagonist of the novel) has done a great job. That’s all I know. And I also know about the new readers who are now approaching the book thanks to the television series.” He considers this to be the main benefit of the adaptation from page to screen.

  After three long novels — A Gentleman in Moscow came between Rules of Civility (2011) and The Lincoln Highway (2021) — Towles published a volume of short stories earlier this year: Table for Two. And what a coincidence that the protagonist of the first story is, like Count Rostov and other characters in his books, also a Russian. He’s named Pushkin, to be more precise. Is this a tribute to classic Russian literature?

  “It’s more of a coincidence. I don’t have any Russian family. I don’t speak Russian. I didn’t study Russian history at university. I’ve only been to Russia three times, for 20 days or so. So it’s a coincidence. When I was writing Rules of Civility, I wanted the protagonist’s father to have lived a hard life and to pass on to her the virtues of having few expectations, working hard and being cautious, so it made sense that he was of Russian origin. Nothing more.”

  An avid reader, Towles readily admits that War and Peace (1867) is one of his three favourite novels. “Along with Moby Dick (1851) and One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967),” he clarifies. “Books that are somewhat similar, because they’re so huge and ambitious. They contain the world.”

  “I fell in love with Russian literature as a teenager,” he recalls, “and I read all the great 19th-century novelists and short story writers. Then, I got interested in the avant-garde of the early 20th century. And then the Soviet era. So, for 30 years, I had been reading a lot about Russian culture. It seemed natural to me that [A Gentleman in Moscow] should be set in Russia.”

  Amor Towles, pictured during his interview with EL PAÍS.
  Amor Towles, pictured during his interview with EL PAÍS.
  Corrie Aune
  Unlike his novels, which are set in historical periods — Count Rostov lives in Soviet-era Moscow, Rules of Civility takes place in late-1930s New York City, while The Lincoln Highway tours 1950s America — most of the stories in Table for Two occur in this millennium. However, there’s something in the collection’s pages that manages to escape time. Perhaps it’s a literary style.

  For an author accustomed to the long-range of the novel, writing stories — “a genre that’s not very popular in the U.S.” — was a radically different creative exercise. “In a novel, the writer must be very aware of the direction: if, during the first 50 pages, you don’t know what’s happening, you abandon it. But the most important thing when it comes to constructing meaning for readers is the evolutionary dynamic: how the characters change, the experiences they go through, what they learn… then, there are layers of meaning and metaphors that are built over time, in the course of the narrative,” he explains.

  “None of this exists in the short story. You let yourself fall into it; things happen the moment you enter. [And] just when you start to glimpse what the characters’ lives are like, why these things have happened to them, it ends,” he continues, assuring EL PAÍS that the vehicle of the story allows for certain things that wouldn’t work in the novel. “For example, the slightly sarcastic, cynical and arrogant narrator in one of the stories — who’s very entertaining there — would bore you in a novel.” Also, he notes, the short story format is unpredictable, with unexpected endings, which can invite you to rethink what you have read.

  Towles worked in the financial sector before devoting himself entirely to writing, although it would be incorrect to say that he swapped one thing for another. He stresses that he began writing as a child and only left the investment bank when success had smiled upon him. “I didn’t put my [livelihood] at risk,” he smiles.

  His answers are neither categorical, nor conclusive. From his universal literary tastes to his choice of the so-called “great American novel” — a genre all on its own — the writer embraces numerous options. “The term is more than half-a-century old. And the American novel, let’s say, is actually 175 years old, approximately, because it dates back to 1850, or something like that. The idea of a national novel is less prevalent in other countries, such as Spain or France, where the focus is more on individual works than on a defining novel.”

  “I think that, in the U.S., it’s less about a book than about an idea: the conquest of territory and the geographical expansion of the country, optimism, immigration… novels such as The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, or Moby Dick… but you need 50 years of distance to gain perspective. My novel The Lincoln Highway is also, in this sense, an American novel,” he explains, referring to a coming-of-age story driven by dreams and ambitions, which defined how the country was forged.

  When you hear his frequent mentions of iconic fiction, or see his study, with books stacked to the ceiling, it’s not necessary to wonder if Towles is a serious reader. “Obviously, I’ve read a lot of Latin American literature. Also French literature. So it’s not that Russia has a unique position in my readings, but it’s important.” He cites Jean Genet, Céline, Toni Morrison, magical realism, the Beat Generation and detective novels. Or even Paul Auster, who’s the involuntary character — that is, a fictionalized character — in a delightful story about a young apprentice writer and how rewarding literary glory can be.

  An image from the series A Gentleman in Moscow
  An image from the series A Gentleman in Moscow
  PARAMOUNT
  The question about the presumed death of the novel hangs in the air, anathema in his studio, a space that’s devoted to literary creation. Refuting it further illustrates the global success of his books: his second novel was on The New York Times best-seller list for two years. “More books have been sold in the United States in recent years than ever before, so fiction is holding its own. Certainly, the cultural landscape has changed everywhere, all the time: every 50 years, it does so significantly. Right now, it’s the rise of social media, of streaming services… and that has created more distractions and ways in which the citizen can access stories, or information, or art, or whatever. So the novel [is part of] an increasingly crowded field, but one cannot suggest that this has led to the death of the novel,” he affirms. On the other hand, Towles offers a worse prognosis about the feature film’s fight for survival. “The movie theaters are relatively empty,” he shrugs.

  Towles tends to see the glass as being half-full. This includes his take on the political situation in his country. He’s relieved to see that the polls are swinging towards Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. “Polarization only exists when you look at America from one angle. On the big issues, most Americans agree: two-thirds support a woman’s right to choose, stricter levels of gun control, doing something about global warming, or the U.S. getting involved in international affairs in a productive way. But you wouldn’t know all this from what the Republicans say. [They’re] interested in stirring up the debate to create friction, even if there’s agreement on these main issues,” he opines. He dismisses the tension on Twitter and Fox News, declaring that “the political debate is much more toxic than the reality of the country.”

  “Trump goes around saying things like ‘we have a terrible crime wave.’ And, statistically, this isn’t true. It’s the lowest level in 25 years. Or [he says] that the economy is a mess, but, in fact, it’s doing so well that most European countries would kill to have an economy like ours, with 4% unemployment… so I don’t have much reason to be pessimistic. The only fear is that Trump’s angry discourse, all his misinformation, will move people to vote for him. And that would be a bad result. But even if Trump were to win, I’m positive about the resilience of the U.S.”

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• All Things Considered - https://www.npr.org/2024/04/02/1242328521/amor-towles-checked-in-to-the-beverly-hills-hotel-to-edit-new-novella

  Amor Towles checked in to the Beverly Hills Hotel to edit new novella
  April 2, 20244:24 PM ET
  Heard on All Things Considered
  By

  Elena Burnett

  ,

  Courtney Dorning

  ,

  Mary Louise Kelly

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  NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with author Amor Towles about his new short story collection Table for Two and how his novella picked up Eve's story where he left off in Rules of Civility.

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  MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

  At the very end of Amor Towles' first novel, "Rules Of Civility," his character Evelyn Ross is on a train. The year is 1938. She is pulling out of New York City, having just completely blown up her life there. And she's heading home to Indiana, except she doesn't get off where she's supposed to. All we're told is she has instead extended her ticket all the way to LA. Well, as readers, we're left wondering, why? And did she make it? And what happened next to beautiful, brilliant, damaged Evelyn Ross? Well, it turns out Amor Towles was wondering, too. And so last year the author checked himself into the Beverly Hills Hotel and, as he puts it, finally gave Eve the story she deserved. The result is "Table For Two," a collection of short stories and the novella "Eve In Hollywood." Amor Towles, hi there.

  AMOR TOWLES: Hi. Thank you, Mary Louise.

  KELLY: Is checking oneself into the Beverly Hills Hotel to write a novel as absolutely marvelous as it sounds?

  TOWLES: Well, yeah, it's not the suffering artist template.

  KELLY: It's not hardship duty.

  TOWLES: It's not the template of a suffering artist. No. It was - it's always fun to step into a place like that that you're writing about sort of to instill your writing with sort of a slightly different mood than you would have while being at home.

  KELLY: Well, for any IRS auditors listening in, I will note this was a legit business expense.

  TOWLES: Yes.

  KELLY: You do set most of the novella, like, by the pool and in the bar and in the streets of the Beverly Hills Hotel because your character Eve has checked in. Why?

  TOWLES: When I was writing the passage in "Rules Of Civility" in which Eve was going to arrive at the train station in Chicago where her parents were going to pick her up, as I was writing the paragraph, I stopped and thought, she would never get off that train.

  KELLY: Oh.

  TOWLES: You know, in a way...

  KELLY: So she surprised you.

  TOWLES: Yeah. She insisted that, really. So then sort of on the spur of the moment, you know, it was like I had to kind of rethink and rewrite what happened to her. And she ends up extending her ticket to Los Angeles, which, I guess, to some degree, is as far away as she could get from her parents without leaving the continental U.S., right? But she's attracted probably to the glamour of it, too, in the back of my mind. She's landing there in 1938, sort of in the golden age of Hollywood. And she - I love Eve as a character, and she's a little bit of a troublemaker. She's pretty willful. She's very independent-minded. And so I kind of always thought, man, she's going to - I wonder what's going to happen to her in California. She's going to cause all kinds of trouble, I'm sure.

  KELLY: And she does.

  TOWLES: Yeah. And so that was kind of the starting point. So I did all that without doing any applied research, without going to the hotel. I just did it as a work of imagination. I then did - to edit it, I went and moved into the Beverly Hills Hotel for, you know, a less than a week to edit it, and that's very typical...

  KELLY: Less than a week. I would have dragged it out for - I don't know - at least two.

  TOWLES: Yeah. Well, you know...

  KELLY: (Laughter).

  TOWLES: You're right. I mean, you know, my wife and my kids were like, what's - you know, Dad, what are you doing? So, you know, you can only get so many days in a row. But it sort of opens the question of why. And different writers approach these things in different ways, but I am a person who does like to write something that I feel comfortable imagining. I'm a fan of Hollywood in the '30s - the movies, the society of it - and including the '40s. So I'd like to take something that I'm familiar with, imagine it fully so that it's not weighed down by sort of the burdens of research. You know, I feel like when I - when you do applied research, you're going to start to feel it in the prose. You know, it starts to be some things that are being clunked down into the narrative as landmarks. And they're not there organically, springing from the lives of the characters, springing from sort of the thematic integrity of the story. And so that's been a very fruitful process for me.

  KELLY: Speaking of Hollywood in the golden age of Hollywood, your plot here depends on the quaint notion that a photograph is exactly what it seems, could not be altered - that if, say, you had a compromising photo of a movie star not clothed, that it is exactly what it looks like. Is that - I wondered, as I read, is that part of why you set your novels all in the past? You don't have to deal...

  TOWLES: Yeah.

  KELLY: ...With, like, pesky modern technology ruining your plot twists.

  TOWLES: Yeah. That's interesting. You know, and in "Table For Two," there's six stories. All kind of end up in New York City, but five of them are around the millennium. But even that has become a long time ago - right? - you know, 'cause some of those are 1998. And the world today is so different from then in terms of what you're asking, in terms of what information we can get at our fingertips, how we communicate together. You know, all kinds of things have shifted pretty radically.

  And, yes, it is refreshing for me as a writer to move back into a time where there's less of all of that, where there isn't a cellphone readily at hand and there isn't Google and there isn't email, there isn't, you know, big social networks because you can start to narrow it down to the more basic human interactions. And that's very liberating. "The Lincoln Highway," my last novel, is set in 1954. And you really - it's about four 18-year-olds who are friends, in essence. And to bring it back to that time allows you really to see the interactions in the most direct, human-to-human fashion.

  KELLY: Well, and allows them to actually get lost on a road trip instead of just...

  TOWLES: Well, that's true, too.

  KELLY: ...Following the blinking pin on your Google map, etc.

  TOWLES: Yeah. If they can't find each other, they can't find each other.

  KELLY: Yeah.

  TOWLES: You know? Right.

  KELLY: Explain the title, "Table For Two."

  TOWLES: Well, "Table For Two" - what ended up happening here is I gathered the six New York stories together. I took this brief - this, you know, shorter "Eve In Hollywood" and expanded it into this longer text. I was preparing to hand in the manuscript to my publisher, and I really didn't have a title at that time. So I begin to sort of sift through, having just reread the manuscript multiple times as I'm editing it, sifting through. Is there something there that sort of pulls us together? What really leapt out at me was that in almost every story and in Eve, there are critical moments where there are two central characters sitting across from each other at a small table, often in a kitchen, and hashing out some significant element of their lives which has come to the surface through the events of that particular story. And I sort of thought, oh, that's sort of interesting. And I noticed it, let's say, for two or three stories, and then you kind of say, wait a second. What about - is it elsewhere? And then I realized, oh, my God, it's in every one of them, practically, I think with one exception.

  And so then that sort of opens up this sort of notion of - something must have been operating in the back of my mind or subconsciously about that space, about that moment when two people face each other. Something has happened. They have an intricate relationship already. Their relationship may be changing because of this incident that has occurred or something that has happened, and they need to kind of begin to reorient themselves to each other, to themselves as they face whatever the consequences are of this thing that has happened, whatever that thing is. And so that sort of powerful moment that we all can have with our spouse, with a child, with a sibling at that sort of moment of one-on-one conversation across a table - suddenly, I realized that turned out to be a central theme that I wasn't really planning on - and thus the title.

  KELLY: Well, and it speaks, again, to that very basic level of human interaction that you can only have face to face and without the intervention of technology.

  TOWLES: That's right. And I do like to think - metaphorically, of course - that an aspect of the "Table For Two" is me as the author and you as the reader. You know, the reading of this book is a version of the reader sitting across the table from me and us having a conversation where I do most of the talking but nonetheless, you know, a conversation.

  KELLY: Amor Towles. His wonderful new book is "Table For Two." Thank you.

  TOWLES: Thank you, Mary Louise.

  (SOUNDBITE OF MAY ERLEWINE AND THE WOODY GOSS BAND SONG, "PALM OF MY HAND")

Table for Two. By Amor Towles. Apr. 2024. 464p. Viking, $32 (9780593296370).

Towles [The Lincoln Highway, 2021) turns to short fiction in this collection of six expansive stories, ranging in setting from Russia to Manhattan, and a noir-tinged novella that takes place in late 1930s Hollywood. His captivating storytelling voice and sly sense of humor on full display, Towles tells the stories of a Russian man named Pushkin who transforms standing in line into a fine art, an aspiring novelist who discovers a gift for forgery, a larcenous retired art dealer, a father-in-law with a secret talent for disco-themed roller-skating, and more. Fans of Towles' first novel, Rules of Civility (2011), will recognize the spunky heroine of Eve in Hollywood, this collection's novella, which follows one of Rules' central characters as she moves on to a new life on the West Coast and, in a gracefully meandering tribute to the movies of the 1930s, gets wrapped up with gumshoes, evil producers, pool boys, paparazzi, has-been actors, and even the real-life Olivia de Havilland. While lighter weight than Towles' longer fictions, these short pieces are just as diverting. --Margaret Quamme

HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Towles will delight his fans and short-fiction lovers as he follows his guest editorship for The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year, 2023 with a collection of his own stories.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
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Quamme, Margaret. "Table for Two." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 14, 15 Mar. 2024, p. 42. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788124922/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=55770e5c. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025.

Towles, Amor TABLE FOR TWO Viking (Fiction None) $28.80 4, 2 ISBN: 9780593296370

In his first collection, Towles sequel-izes his debut novel, Rules of Civility (2011), with a 200-page novella and adds six short fictions involving unlikely encounters and unexpected outcomes.

Set in the late 1930s, the novella, Eve in Hollywood, extends the story of Evelyn Ross, nervy sidekick of Rules protagonist Katey Kontent. On a train from New York to Los Angeles, the flinty, facially scarred blond, impulsively rejecting a return to her home in Indiana, strikes up a friendship with widowed former homicide cop Charlie Granger. They meet months later in L.A. when Eve's cutely met new friend, starlet Olivia de Havilland, is blackmailed over surreptitiously taken nude photos. In classic noir fashion, an untrustworthy man of significant girth is at the heart of the plot. The book's other lively pairings include a used bookseller and a young would-be writer who finds his calling forging signatures of famous authors for him (Paul Auster plays a key role); a newly committed concertgoer and an older patron who drives him to distraction by secretly recording the music; and two travelers stranded at the airport who share a cab ride to a hotel, where one of them transforms from a harmless nice guy into a raging alcoholic and the other attempts to drag him away from the bar on desperately phoned orders from the man's wife. Towles has fun leaping ahead with his narratives. In a cruel twist of fate, a peasant in late-czarist Russia pays a price for daring to profit from holding people's places on excessively long food lines in Moscow. Towles sometimes lays on the philosophical wisdom and historical knowledge a bit, but the novella and all the stories are treated to his understated (and occasionally mischievous) irony.

A sneakily entertaining assortment of tales.

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"Towles, Amor: TABLE FOR TWO." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A782202790/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=77fdb15d. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025.

''Table for Two'' is a collection of six stories and a novella set in two very different cultural capitals.

TABLE FOR TWO: Fictions, by Amor Towles

Few literary stylists not named Ann Patchett attain best-sellerdom, but Amor Towles makes the cut. His three lauded novels -- ''Rules of Civility,'' ''A Gentleman in Moscow'' and ''The Lincoln Highway'' -- hung around on lists for months, if not years. But Towles's commercial brio belies the care and craft he lavishes on each piece, evidenced now in ''Table for Two,'' a knockout collection of six stories and a longish novella.

The book spans the 20th century, bringing characters from a range of backgrounds into tableaus of deceit and desire. Beneath his coifed prose Towles is a master of the shiv, the bait and switch; we see the flash of light before the shock wave strikes, often in the final sentence.

''Table for Two'' is a tale of two cities, New York and Los Angeles, cultural capitals on opposite ends of the continent but forever tracking the other's trends and deals, a mutual voyeurism. Towles devotes the first section to New York, its wealthy and famous shuffling against strivers and innocents in La Guardia terminals, musty bookstores or immigrant communities.

''The Bootlegger'' depicts a woman's epiphany after a Carnegie Hall concert. In ''The Line,'' a naïve Communist builds a lucrative business that steers him to Manhattan, where con games lurk on every corner. In ''The Ballad of Timothy Touchett,'' an allegory of 1990s excess, a rare-books dealer with the Dickensian name of Pennybrook manipulates the sympathies of his young assistant, who forges autographs of eminent authors until he's busted by one. ''Hasta Luego'' tells the unnerving story of an alcoholic snowbound in a Midtown bar on the cusp of the millennium; Towles can't resist mentions of Motorola and Nokia flip phones, reminding us how far away the near past really is.

But the Oscar goes to ''Eve in Hollywood,'' a novella that unfolds during the filming of ''Gone With the Wind.'' Towles tricks out the Tinseltown lore in a homage to the heyday of studio moguls and the hard-boiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, even alluding to actual legends like Errol Flynn's use of two-way mirrors and peepholes.

Towles plucks a character from ''Rules of Civility,'' Evelyn Ross, who'd vanished on a Chicago-bound train, picking up her narrative as she's traveling to California. In the dining car she meets Charlie, a retired L.A.P.D. officer who will later prove an asset. She checks into the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she befriends an eclectic crew: a portly, has-been actor; a chauffeur with stuntman aspirations; and the rising star Olivia de Havilland. Lithe and blond, sporting an upper-class air and a distinctive facial scar, Eve is fearless, equally at home among poolside cabanas and seedy clubs where the music's loud and the booze flows.

''From across the room you could see that no one had a leash on her,'' one petty crook observes. ''With the narrowed eyes of a killer, she was sussing out the place, and she liked what she saw. She liked the band, the tempo, the tequila -- the whole shebang. If Dehavvy was bandying about with the likes of this one, you wouldn't have long to wait for the wrong place and the wrong time to have their tearful reunion.''

When nude photos of de Havilland go missing, part of a larger tabloid plot, Eve vows to save her friend's reputation. She's a femme fatale turned inside out, matching wits amid an array of villains, including a former cop with a double cross up his sleeve. Towles is clearly enjoying himself, nodding to noir classics such as ''The Postman Always Rings Twice,'' ''Chinatown'' and ''L.A. Confidential.'' The period details are nearly airtight, although I did notice tiny anachronisms about Elizabeth Taylor and the slang term ''easy peasy.''

''Table for Two'' delivers the kick of a martini served in the Polo Lounge -- the cover art is a cropped image of a couple at a bar, dressed in black tie -- but there's more here than high gloss. Both coasts are ideal settings for morality plays about power, as Towles cunningly weaves in themes of exploitation, an allusion to Shelley's ''Ozymandias,'' a bust of Julius Caesar glimpsed by Eve on the Ides of March. Whether we're living in the era of late-stage capitalism is beside the point; money, Towles suggests, will simply mutate into another form, preying on the vulnerable. ''When it moves, it moves quickly, without a sound, a second thought, or the slightest hint of consequence,'' he writes. ''Like the wind that spins a windmill, money comes out of nowhere, sets the machinery in motion, then disappears without a trace.'' It's on us to summon our better angels.

Sharp-edged satire deceptively wrapped like a box of Neuhaus chocolates, ''Table for Two'' is a winner.

TABLE FOR TWO: Fictions | By Amor Towles | Viking | 451 pp. | $32

Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of ''This Boy's Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing.''

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Cain, Hamilton. "Opportunity Coasts." The New York Times Book Review, 14 Apr. 2024, p. 10. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A789933109/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8acaace6. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025.

Table for Two

by Amor Towles

Hutchinson Heinemann, [pounds sterling]18.99, pp.480

Amor Towles was a Wall Street banker before he published his first novel, Rules of Civility, in 2011, at the age of 46. Since then, his books have sold six million copies, and the second, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), has been made into a Paramount + series starring Ewan McGregor.

Towles's success in banking and publishing has perhaps given him a particular insight into the American Dream. The six stories and one novella that make up his stylish and confident new collection, Table for Tw o , all feature characters in pursuit of an ambition that puts them in varying degrees of peril--protagonists tasked with missions of differing seriousness. There is the Russian peasant who must tell his communist wife that he has accidentally bought them tickets to New York; a forger of famous authors' signatures; the daughter who follows her stepfather incognito to find out where he goes on Saturday afternoons; and the stranger who promises to keep an alcoholic out of a bar and get him on a plane.

In 'Eve of Hollywood', a character from Rules of Civility is revisited. Evelyn Ross was on a Chicago-bound train in that novel but here she buys a ticket to Los Angeles, where she arrives with a single red valise and a thirst for martinis. Previously, she was in an accident, and now her 'marred' beauty is much reflected upon. She was, as one man observes:

All blond and blue- eyed with a spunky little hourglass figure to boot. She wasn't [his] type, but without the scar and the limp she would have been everybody else's.

A kind of #MeToo story from the 1930s follows, as the actress Olivia de Havilland is blackmailed, after nude photographs are taken of her through a two-way mirror without her knowledge, just as she is about to star as the saintly Melanie in Gone With the Wind. This is the slowest of the pieces and takes quite a while to get going. More immediately satisfying are the short, sharp morality tales--which all end in New York--that precede it. This version of the city is wholly recognisable: one story even hinges, somewhat poignantly, on Paul Auster being a living author. The collection was published in the US before his death.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Peake-Tomkinson, Alex. "Morality tales." Spectator, vol. 355, no. 10217, 22 June 2024, p. 40. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A809009073/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6be5b3e5. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025.

Towles, Amor THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY Viking (Fiction None) $30.00 10, 5 ISBN: 978-0-73-522235-9

Newly released from a work farm in 1950s Kansas, where he served 18 months for involuntary manslaughter, 18-year-old Emmett Watson hits the road with his little brother, Billy, following the death of their father and the foreclosure of their Nebraska farm.

They leave to escape angry townspeople who believe Emmett got off easy, having caused the fatal fall of a taunting local boy by punching him in the nose. The whip-smart Billy, who exhibits OCD–like symptoms, convinces Emmett to drive them to San Francisco to reunite with their mother, who left town eight years ago. He insists she's there, based on postcards she sent before completely disappearing from their lives. But when Emmett's prized red Studebaker is "borrowed" by two rambunctious, New York–bound escapees from the juvie facility he just left, Emmett takes after them via freight train with Billy in tow. Billy befriends a Black veteran named Ulysses who's been riding the rails nonstop since returning home from World War II to find his wife and baby boy gone. A modern picaresque with a host of characters, competing points of view, wandering narratives, and teasing chapter endings, Towles' third novel is even more entertaining than his much-acclaimed A Gentleman in Moscow (2016). You can quibble with one or two plot turns, but there's no resisting moments such as Billy's encounter, high up in the Empire State Building in the middle of the night, with professor Abacus Abernathe, whose Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers he's read 24 times. A remarkable blend of sweetness and doom, Towles' novel is packed with revelations about the American myth, the art of storytelling, and the unrelenting pull of history.

An exhilarating ride through Americana.

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"Towles, Amor: THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A668237846/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=76289f5b. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025.

The Lincoln Highway

Amor Towles. Viking, $30 (576p) ISBN 978-0-7352-2235-9

Towles's magnificent comic road novel (after A Gentleman in Moscow) follows the rowdy escapades of four boys in the 1950s and doubles as an oldfashioned nattative about farms, families, and accidental friendships. In June 1954, 18-year-old Emmett Watson returns to his childhood farm in Morgen, Neb., from a juvenile detention camp. Emmett has been released early from his sentencing for fighting because his father has died and his homestead has been foreclosed. His precocious eight-year-old brother, Billy, greets him, anxious to light out for San Francisco in hopes of finding their mother, who abandoned them. Plans immediately go awry when two escaped inmates from Emmett's camp, Duchess and Woolly, appear in the Watsons' barn. Woolly says his grandfather has stashed $150,000 in the family's Adirondack Mountains cabin, which he offers to split evenly between the three older boys. But Duchess and Woolly take off with Emmett's Studebaker, leaving the brothers in pursuit as boxcar boys. On the long and winding railway journey, the brothets encounter characters like the scabrous Pastor John and an endearing WWII vet named Ulysses, and Billy's constant companion, a book titled Professor Abacus Abernathe's Compendium of Heroes, Adventures, and Other Intrepid Travelers, provides parallel story lines of epic events and heroic adventures. Woolly has a mind for stories, too, compating his monotonous time in detention to that of Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo and hoping eventually to experience a "one-of-a-kind kind of day." Towles is a supreme storytellet, and this one-of-a-kind novel pleases on every page. (Oct.)

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"The Lincoln Highway." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 33, 16 Aug. 2021, p. 56. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A673346355/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d5a82fae. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025.

THE LINCOLN HIGHWAYBy Amor Towles

Amor Towles's third novel begins with a deceptively straightforward premise. Upon the death of his father from cancer, 18-year-old Emmett Watson is released early from a juvenile work farm in Kansas and driven home by a kind warden to a small town in Nebraska, where he is reunited with his precocious 8-year-old brother, Billy. Facing foreclosure on the family farm and violent retribution from the family of the bully he accidentally killed at the fairgrounds, Emmett has an immediate and stark choice -- should he stay or should he go?

His decision to start fresh leads to a second choice -- Texas or California? Trained as a carpenter, Emmett seeks a destination with a rapidly growing population where he can make a living flipping houses. After a morning spent in the library with the Encyclopaedia Britannica -- it's 1954 -- he decides that California is the more promising place. It's a sentimental as well as practical choice, home to his mother, who left the family years earlier, sending back postcards from locales along the Lincoln Highway during her journey west.

Young Billy, eager to traverse his mother's path, proves to be a worthy sidekick for this all-American journey. He wears a watch with a second hand and carries in his Army surplus backpack a flashlight, a compass and a folded road map, along with his mother's postcards and a well-thumbed compendium of adventure stories featuring 26 heroes, from Achilles to Zorro. From the cherished book, he knows the tropes of the travel tale, the requirements of heroes. California, here we come.

[ Read an excerpt from ''The Lincoln Highway.'' ]

Indeed, a reader might very well be fooled into thinking that Towles is setting off -- westward, ho-hum -- along the deeply rutted tracks of our national lore. But glittering California is a delightful trick of misdirection played on both the Watsons and the reader. Not only do Emmett and Billy never make it there, they don't even advance one westward mile. In fact, over 10 days and 500 pages, they travel about as far away from California as is possible in the continental United States. If you want to make God laugh, Towles suggests, consult the Encyclopaedia Britannica for population statistics, unfold your map, plan your route. Give yourself a tight deadline of July 4, your mother's favorite holiday. Then say hello to ... New York. As it turns out, not reaching the intended destination becomes entirely the point and power of this mischievous, wise and wildly entertaining novel.

Though capable and self-reliant, Emmett is hardly the master of his own destiny. This was clear when the mouthy kid he punched at the county fair stumbled backward, tripped over a cable, struck his head on a concrete block and died 62 days later -- ''the ugly side of chance,'' the warden tells Emmett -- and it's equally clear when he returns home to consider his future. It doesn't matter that his plan is lawful, well conceived, well researched. In the universe of this novel, grit and integrity and determination matter, not because they get you where you want to go but because they allow you to persist when you're inevitably blown off course by chance, vicissitude and the disruptive schemes of fellow questers.

About those fellow questers: There were, it turns out, a couple of stowaways, Emmett's former bunkmates at the work farm, in the trunk of the kind warden's car. ''Ta-da!'' says one, Duchess, the resourceful son of a vaudevillian, as Emmett discovers him in the barn. Duchess is a persuasive and original figure, an avenging moral accountant with a ledger of debts to collect (and occasionally to pay). He is the type of person who provides nuanced ethical reasoning before striking someone in the skull with a two-by-four or a frying pan. Or before driving a stolen car to Harlem to demand a beating from a man he once wronged at the work farm.

Woolly, the other stowaway, is a sweet, stunted, ''medicine''-addicted naïf from a wealthy Northeastern family. Woolly has been deemed unfit to receive a large family trust, and Duchess and Woolly have in mind an ''escapade'' to the Adirondacks to retrieve the money from the wall safe of a family home. (And along the way, Duchess hopes to even a few scores, including one with his father.) In need of a car, Duchess and Woolly attempt to recruit the Watson boys as third and fourth musketeers.

Emmett, in possession of a genuine American dream, has no use for an escapade, but he agrees to drive the fugitives to the bus station in Omaha, a couple of hours to the east, a small but manageable setback to his California scheme. (He keeps running the numbers in his head, revising his E.T.A.) Duchess, the novel's primary agent of chaos and digression, requests a short detour to an orphanage where he used to live. After he breaks in through a window to deliver strawberry preserves to the orphans, he steals Emmett's Studebaker and, with Woolly, commences escapade.

At this exhilarating point, California vanishes, the novel moves steadily east by car and train, and Towles goes all in on the kind of episodic, exuberant narrative haywire found in myth or Homeric epic. The novel opens wide, detours beget detours, the point of view expands and rotates. As with Zeno's arrow, contemplated by Emmett at one point, the novel's many journeys are ''infinitely bisected.'' Distance is subdivided and arrival deferred. Stories proliferate and intersect, as do characters, who are diverse in many ways, save gender. (The book lacks a prominent female traveler, and readers might wish that Towles had done more with the gendered traditions of adventure and domesticity.) It's tempting to speak of the book's cast of minor characters, though one gradually learns that there are no minor characters. Each one of them, Towles implies, is the central protagonist of an ongoing adventure that is both unique and universal.

Duchess, the engine of the book, seeks his father, seeks atonement and retribution, seeks that safe full of money in the Adirondacks. Emmett seeks Duchess and his Studebaker, as do the police. Billy befriends a Black veteran named Ulysses who has been riding trains for years since returning from the war, his homecoming persistently deferred. Abacus Abernathe, the author of Billy's beloved compendium, is found on the 55th floor of the Empire State Building and coaxed from his narrative perch back into the world. The anthology of journeys is a touchstone for Billy and for Towles, who is out to demonstrate the profound entanglement of story and life, the ways in which each generates the other.

At nearly 600 pages, ''The Lincoln Highway'' is remarkably brisk, remarkably buoyant. Though dark shadows fall across its final chapters, the book is permeated with light, wit, youth. Many novels this size are telescopes, but this big book is a microscope, focused on a small sample of a vast whole. Towles has snipped off a minuscule strand of existence -- 10 wayward days -- and when we look through his lens we see that this brief interstice teems with stories, grand as legends.

Chris Bachelder's novels include ''The Throwback Special'' and ''Abbott Awaits.'' THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY By Amor Towles 592 pp. Viking. $30.

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PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY Nolan Pelletier FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 The New York Times Company
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Bachelder, Chris. "Along for the Ride." The New York Times Book Review, 7 Nov. 2021, p. 9(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A681451866/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=641438ba. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025.

The Lincoln Highway. By Amor Towles. Read by a full cast. 2021.16.5hr. Books on Tape, CD, $50 (9780593452097).

Award-winning narrator Edoardo Ballerini leads a stellar production of this beautifully written and absorbing story by the best-selling author of A Gentleman in Moscow (2016). Ballerini delivers a perfect performance with his versatile, silky voice, demonstrating that this latest gem from Towles is meant to be heard. Listeners follow 18-year-old Emmett Watson, who has just been released, from a juvenile work farm in 1950s Nebraska. Emmett's plans to start anew in California with his eight-year-old brother, Billy, are derailed by fellow work-farm escapees who have stolen Emmett's car and money. The story is told from multiple points of view that change between third-person and first-person perspectives, which the narrators transition between seamlessly, creating different levels of intimacy for the listener. Ballerini masterfully brings to life Towles' complex characters, inviting listeners to explore their behavior and flaws while becoming emotionally invested. Of particular excellence is his rendition of Billy's innocence and intelligence. The other narrators, Marin Ireland and Dion Graham, provide spot-on portrayals of memorable supporting characters. Blending charm and heartbreak, this expansive and ambitious novel is one to savor. Fans of This Tender Land (2019), by William Kent Krueger, will find plenty to enjoy. --Van McGary

YA: Teen readers of classics and literary historical fiction will find ambitious, determined Emmett appealing. MQ.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
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McGary, Van. "The Lincoln Highway." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 5-6, 1 Nov. 2021, p. 82. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A684472138/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0ce4ccf8. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025.

''My wife gave me the first edition of Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' to be published in English (in 1886),'' says the novelist Amor Towles, whose new book is ''The Lincoln Highway.'' ''That the edition was in translation was just as well, since I don't read a word of Russian.''

What books are on your night stand?

For the last 16 years, I've been reading with three friends. Every month, we meet in a restaurant in New York City to discuss a novel, arriving at 7 and lingering until they close the place. We typically pursue projects. One spring we read Henry James's ''The Portrait of a Lady,'' Gustave Flaubert's ''Madame Bovary,'' George Eliot's ''Middlemarch'' and Leo Tolstoy's ''Anna Karenina,'' a project we referred to as ''19th-Century Wives Under Pressure.'' Often, we'll read five or six works by a single writer chronologically. We're about to launch into a survey of the Australian Nobel laureate, Patrick White. So, his ''The Tree of Man'' is at the top of my pile.

What's the last great book you read?

Earlier this year, I was asked to write an introduction for the forthcoming Penguin Classics edition of Ernest Hemingway's first novel, ''The Sun Also Rises.'' I enjoyed rereading the book immensely. Hemingway began writing it on his 26th birthday, almost a hundred years ago. At the time, he was still married to the first of his four wives. By trade, he was still a foreign correspondent living in Paris. It was before his trip to Africa to hunt big game. Before his face would adorn the cover of Life magazine -- three separate times. Before the compromising effects of fame, wealth and recognition. So, in picking up ''The Sun Also Rises'' today, we have the opportunity to set aside what we think we know about Hemingway as a man and writer, to set aside what we think we know about his style, to read the book as if it were newly released, and to be amply rewarded for doing so.

Can a great book be badly written? What other criteria can overcome bad prose?

Great writing can make almost anything interesting. Any subjects, any settings, any themes. But for me, bad writing is an insurmountable obstacle.

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

When I was a college sophomore in the early 1980s, I had the good fortune of being admitted to a fiction writing seminar with a visiting modernist named Walter Abish. As part of the class, he gave us a list of about a hundred novels that he admired. The list included an array of inventive writers and stylists, most of whom I had never heard of, including Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino, Evan S. Connell, Julio Cortázar, Jean Genet, Elizabeth Hardwick, Knut Hamsun, Milan Kundera, Grace Paley and Alain Robbe-Grillet. With the list fraying in my pocket, I began tracking down these novels whenever I was in a used bookstore. For the next few years, as soon as school would let out, I would retreat alone to my family's summer house, where I would sit on the porch and read one book a day. It was pure bliss. It also had a lasting influence on me as an artist.

What's your favorite book no one else has heard of?

Harry Mathews's ''Cigarettes.'' The only American-born member of the experimental confederacy Oulipo, Mathews often wrote about shattering conventions, and thus his work can be somewhat uneven. But in ''Cigarettes'' he gives us a sly, inventive and entertaining novel which is a racy investigation of midcentury New York society.

Which writers -- novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets -- working today do you admire most?

I admire a lot of my contemporaries as writers. But Ann Patchett is someone I admire not simply as a writer, but as an advocate for independent bookstores and new voices, as half of a grand marriage, as a graceful thinker, a sly humorist, a generous spirit. I could go on.

What do you read when you're working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing?

Before I set out on a new project, I like to read a handful of novels written in (and ideally set in) the time period in which I'm about to immerse myself. My new novel, ''The Lincoln Highway,'' takes place over 10 days in June of 1954, so in anticipation I read a number of American works from the mid-50s including James Baldwin's ''Go Tell It on the Mountain'' (1953); Raymond Chandler's ''The Long Goodbye'' (1953); Flannery O'Connor's ''A Good Man Is Hard to Find'' (1955); and Sloan Wilson's ''The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit'' (1955). What I love in particular about this list of concurrent classics is how varied they are in terms of geography, tone and theme. In aggregate they provide a snapshot of America's socioeconomic, regional and racial diversity. They also showcase very different approaches to effective storytelling.

Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?

During the summer I like to read crime and suspense novels by individual authors in chronological order. In recent summers I've read the Lew Archer novels by Ross Macdonald, the George Smiley novels by John le Carré and the Parker novels by Richard Stark -- all terrific. This summer I've been reading the Bosch books by Michael Connelly, which are so exactly right.

Do you distinguish between ''commercial'' and ''literary'' fiction? Where's that line, for you?

Not really. I'm more interested in distinguishing books that are well written, rich and multilayered from those that aren't (preferring to read the former and skip the latter). If we look back at those books that have survived for more than half a century, they tend to be well written, rich and multilayered, but in their time some were classed as commercial and others as literary.

How do you organize your books?

I keep what I admire close at hand.

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

The shelves in my study are almost exclusively weighed down by books, with a significant weighting to novels. But there are a few exceptions tucked in among the books including DVD sets of the complete original ''Star Trek'' and ''The Rockford Files.'' No explanation necessary.

What's the best book you've ever received as a gift?

''A Gentleman in Moscow'' was published within days of my 20th anniversary. To celebrate, my wife gave me the first edition of Tolstoy's ''War and Peace'' to be published in English (in 1886). That the edition was in translation was just as well, since I don't read a word of Russian.

What's the last book you recommended to a member of your family?

When my son was about 10, we went to London together, where our visit to the Churchill war rooms proved to be a highlight. Last year -- when he was 18 -- we had great fun reading ''The Splendid and the Vile,'' Erik Larson's rip-roaring description of Churchill's first year as prime minister, a year that coincided with the Blitz.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

My discovery of reading as a consuming pleasure began with the Hardy Boys. As a middle-class family in the early 1970s, we didn't dine out or travel that much. But my father was always willing to buy us a book. The summer I discovered the Hardy Boys mysteries, I would spend the day reading one of them from beginning to end, then make my father take me to the bookstore so that he could buy me the next volume. A few years later, it was the works of Ray Bradbury. Then Tolkien. And so on.

Whom would you want to write your life story?

I have no desire to have my life story written. But if it were a necessity, I would ask it be written by someone who would leave my life virtually unrecognizable. Someone like Gabriel García Márquez or Franz Kafka.

You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville and Bob Dylan. It would either be the most interesting dinner of my life, or the one with the most awkward silences. Maybe both.

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PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY Rebecca Clarke FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 The New York Times Company
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"Amor Towles." The New York Times Book Review, 26 Sept. 2021, p. 8(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A676747073/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a2aa6ee1. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025.

Quamme, Margaret. "Table for Two." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 14, 15 Mar. 2024, p. 42. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788124922/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=55770e5c. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025. "Towles, Amor: TABLE FOR TWO." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A782202790/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=77fdb15d. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025. Cain, Hamilton. "Opportunity Coasts." The New York Times Book Review, 14 Apr. 2024, p. 10. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A789933109/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8acaace6. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025. Peake-Tomkinson, Alex. "Morality tales." Spectator, vol. 355, no. 10217, 22 June 2024, p. 40. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A809009073/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6be5b3e5. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025. "Towles, Amor: THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A668237846/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=76289f5b. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025. "The Lincoln Highway." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 33, 16 Aug. 2021, p. 56. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A673346355/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d5a82fae. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025. Bachelder, Chris. "Along for the Ride." The New York Times Book Review, 7 Nov. 2021, p. 9(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A681451866/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=641438ba. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025. McGary, Van. "The Lincoln Highway." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 5-6, 1 Nov. 2021, p. 82. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A684472138/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0ce4ccf8. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025. "Amor Towles." The New York Times Book Review, 26 Sept. 2021, p. 8(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A676747073/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a2aa6ee1. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025.

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