Amor Towles’ next book will be a short story collection that includes a novella set in the world of his literary debut, Rules of Civility, Today.com reports.
Viking will publish Towles’ Table for Two next year. The press describes the book as “a richly detailed and sharply drawn collection of stories set in New York and Los Angeles.”
Towles’ novel Rules of Civility, published by Viking in 2011, follows Katey Kontent and Eve Ross, two young women in post–Great Depression New York who befriend a high-society banker. A critic for Kirkus praised the book as “an elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn’t seem more familiar with his characters or territory.”
In Table for Two, Eve returns in a novella that follows her as she moves from New York to Hollywood. The six short stories in the collection are set in New York and, Viking says, “take up everything from the death-defying acrobatics of the male ego, to the fateful consequences of brief encounters, and the delicate mechanics of [compromise] which operate at the heart of modern marriages.”
Towles, a Kirkus Prize finalist for his 2016 novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, told Today.com that most of the stories in his upcoming collection “deal with fateful interactions between strangers or family members.”
“When I finished the collection, it occurred to me that in many of the stories, a critical moment in the tale involved two of the characters facing each other across a kitchen table to confront some new reality in their lives,” he said.
Table for Two is scheduled for publication on April 2, 2024.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
