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.
The Bar at Twilight
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.
New York Times “Editors’ Choice” selection
New York Magazine “Approval Matrix” selection
BOMB Magazine “Gift Guide” selection
Vol. 1 Brooklyn “Book Preview” selection
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781954276048
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781954276031
Watch Frederic Tuten in conversation about The Bar at Twilight at McNally Jackson Books and read more about his life and work in the East Hampton Star, Washington Independent Review of Books, and Cleveland Review of Books.
Preview stories from The Bar at Twilight in BOMB Magazine and at Literary Hub.
Frederic Tuten is the 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.
visit author page »Praise for The Bar at Twilight
Subtly exultant. . . . The Bar at Twilight solidifies [Tuten’s] reputation as a distinctive, if overlooked, practitioner of literary art.
— East Hampton Star
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.
Heady and elegant. . . . The work of a gifted, resourceful writer: an old master.
— Kirkus Reviews
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
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