The Bar at Twilight
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE
An incomparable storyteller serves up an enchanting concoction of art, love, and longing
In fifteen masterful stories, Frederic Tuten entertains questions of existential magnitude, pervasive yearning, and the creative impulse. A wealthy older woman reflects on her relationship with her drowned husband, a painter, as she awaits her own watery demise. An exhausted artist, feeling stuck, reads a book of criticism about allegory and symbolism before tossing her paintings out the window. Writing a book about the lives of artists he admires-Cezanne, Monet, Rousseau--a man imagines how each vignette could be a life lesson for his wife, the artist he perhaps admires the most.
Whether set in Tuten's beloved Lower East Side, Rome's Borghese Gardens, or a French seaside resort, these stories shift seamlessly between the poignancy of memory into the logic of fairytales or dreams, demonstrating Tuten's exceptional ability to transmute his passion for art and life to the page.
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Frederic Tuten is the award-winning author of five novels, the memoir My Young Life, and two short story collections, Self-Portraits: Fictions and The Bar at Twilight. Among other honors, Tuten has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Writing. He lives in New York.
New York Times "Editors' Choice" selection
New York Magazine "Approval Matrix" selection
BOMB Magazine "Gift Guide" selection
"Intoxicating." --New York Magazine
"Engrossing. . . . Tuten's prose is always vital, often dazzling. . . . The Bar at Twilight is neither normative nor predictable, and it bears the firm impress of the soul." --New York Times Book Review
"The Bar at Twilight is [Tuten's] showcase, revisiting every strand of his bibliography with the benefit of hindsight and at the peak of his powers. . . . [It] is outgoing, lived-in, and gregarious. The word for this is generous." --Bookforum
"Tuten's language is supple, elegant, and wonderfully descriptive. He is also very funny." --Los Angeles Review of Books
"Tuten has managed to reinvent himself in one stylistically daring work after another. . . . The Bar at Twilight is a sumptuous compendium of fables, pastiches, and stories in late style, all of them trussed up in a distinctively earthy, image-obsessed prose. At once riotous and soulful, saturated by a gentle, well-traveled tristesse, the stories feel both strikingly familiar and markedly fresh." --Cleveland Review of Books
"Subtly exultant. . . . The Bar at Twilight solidifies [Tuten's] reputation as a distinctive, if overlooked, practitioner of literary art." --East Hampton Star
"Scintillating. . . . Tuten dazzles like the best of Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, and George Saunders. Here, with The Bar at Twilight, he is at the pinnacle of his craft." --On the Seawall
"The subtlety of [Tuten's] storytelling is wonderful." --North of Oxford
"Heady and elegant. . . . The work of a gifted, resourceful writer: an old master." --Kirkus Reviews
"Heartfelt. . . . No matter whether Tuten is chronicling the creative or romantic lives of his characters, he renders their struggles with a sense of hope." --Publishers Weekly
"The music of Tuten's prose speaks to my heart. His inimitable, imaginative, witty, romantic stories continue to haunt me." --David Gilbert, author of The Normals and & Sons
"Tuten's stories are filled with art, dreams, yearning, and a past that he captures beautifully and deftly and then lets go. The Bar at Twilight is a wonderful, evocative collection." --Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings and The Female Persuasion
