An incomparable storyteller serves up an enchanting concoction of art, love, and longing
Frederic Tuten's stories are filled with art, dreams, yearning, and a past that he captures beautifully and deftly and then lets go. The Bar at Twilight is a wonderful, evocative collection. -Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings and The Female Persuasion
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.
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.
Title: The Bar at Twilight
Author: Tuten, Frederic
ISBN: 9781954276031
Binding:
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Publication Date: 2022-06-03
Number of Pages: 288
Weight: 0.2821 kg
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
Do you enjoy your short fiction with a heady dose of art and absurdism? Tuten's globe-trotting new collection offers plenty of both, providing a dizzying array of locales and imagery that ventures to unexpected places. -Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Heady and elegant. . . . The work of a gifted, resourceful writer: an old master. -Kirkus Reviews
Heartfelt. . . . No matter whether Tuten is chronicling the creative or romantic lives of his characters, he renders their struggles with a sense of hope. -Publishers Weekly
Showcase[s] the deep desire to connect. -Foreword Reviews
Frederic Tuten's stories are filled with art, dreams, yearning, and a past that he captures beautifully and deftly and then lets go. The Bar at Twilight is a wonderful, evocative collection. -Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings and The Female Persuasion
The music of Tuten's prose speaks to my heart. His inimitable, imaginative, witty, romantic stories continue to haunt me. -David Gilbert, author of The Normals and & Sons