Table for Two
Rules of Civility #1.5 incl'd
by Amor Towles
Why You'll Love This
Amor Towles proves he can break your heart in thirty pages just as easily as three hundred.
- Great if you want: elegant short fiction and a substantial novella in one volume
- The experience: unhurried and refined — each story lands with quiet, precise force
- The writing: Towles writes with wit and architectural control — never a wasted sentence
- Skip if: you want a novel — the format here is short stories plus one novella
About This Book
Amor Towles has built a reputation for fiction that takes its time with people — their ambitions, their self-deceptions, the small pivots that quietly reshape a life. Table for Two distills that sensibility into a collection of six stories set in New York and a novella set in Los Angeles, and the range is quietly astonishing. The New York pieces circle around marriages under pressure, men undone by their own pride, and the strange gravity of chance meetings, while the novella follows Rules of Civility's Evelyn Ross west into a Hollywood world with its own peculiar hungers. Together they make a book that asks, with considerable wit and zero sentimentality, what people owe each other when their interests diverge.
What distinguishes the reading experience here is Towles's control — specifically, his gift for the sentence that does more than it appears to. Each story is tightly constructed, with the compressed logic of a watch movement, yet never feels airless. The prose has elegance without affectation, and Towles has the short-fiction writer's sharpest skill: knowing exactly when a story has said what it came to say. For readers who want fiction that trusts their intelligence, this collection rewards close attention.
