Amor Towles

Read my short piece for Condé Nast Traveler which is on my great-great-grandfather’s hat box and his travels in the Belle Époque here.

Read Bookpage’s recent profile of Amor Towles and his new novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, here. “Entering a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, for an annual investment conference some years ago, Amor Towles suddenly envisioned the premise for his inventive, entertaining and richly textured second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow….”

Read Publisher’s Weekly’s recent profile of Amor Towles and his new novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, here. “Sitting over a cappuccino in Caffe Reggio in New York’s Greenwich Village, listening to the novelist Amor Towles speak about the Russian Revolution, it’s not difficult to imagine that this scene is taking place half a century ago…”

To inhabit a place like the Kremlin is not to reside, it is to defend one’s self. Oppression creates revolt, revolt obliges precautions, precautions increase dangers, and this long series of actions and reactions engenders a monster; that monster is despotism, which has built itself a house at Moscow. The giants of the antediluvian world,…

Passages from various books in my library that were published in the 1930s.

When I was ten, our babysitter Mary Fallon turned on the rarely used kitchen radio to a rock & roll station, and it was never turned off again. Bob Dylan and Bob Seeger; Jimmy Hendrix and Jimmy Page; Keith Richards and Keith Moon: in my teens, I came to know all of these gentlemen quite well, and they have been close friends ever since. But before all of that fine electric guitar and amplified attitude, there was Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook (Verve, 1956).

This brief interaction in the nether-hour of Closing Time is not simply a setup for a well-crafted song; it is an archetypal American scene. It is a motif that has persisted over a century of our cultural history—appearing as a central image in important works of fiction, music, and film, and serving as a touchstone for a variety of artistic movements spannin

Though Hopper was active as a painter in New York between the wars—a crowded, volatile and bustling time for the great metropolis—he opted to become a master of the peripheral reverie and the intimate aside. In a quiet café, a young woman sits by herself at a small marble topped table. As a movie plays for patrons, an usherette leans against a wall out of view of the feature. And as the first members of a well-dressed audience assemble, a solitary woman examines her program in her box.

“This very good first novel about striving and surviving in Depression-era Manhattan deserves attention…The great strength of Rules of Civility is in the sharp, sure-handed…evocation of Manhattan in the late ‘30s…  Advance reviews of Mr. Towles’s novel have rarely failed to bring up F. Scott’s name. Who needs such burdensome comparisons? On the evidence of “Rules of…