July 2025: Table for Two by Amor Towles

Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood.

The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters and the delicate mechanics of compromise that operate at the heart of modern marriages. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood” describes how one of Towles’s most beloved characters, the indomitable Evelyn Ross from Rules of Civility, crafts a new future for herself—and others—in a noirish tale that takes us through the movie sets, bungalows, and dive bars of 1930s Los Angeles.

Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting fiction.

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Suggested Indie Bookstores:

• Two Rivers Bookstore (St. Johns, OR)

• Titcomb’s Bookshop (East Sandwich, MA)

• Labyrinth Books (Princeton, NJ)

• I am Books (Boston, MA)

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Favorite Quotes:

• “But if Irina was quiet, she was quiet in the way a heated skillet is quiet—in the moments before you drop in the fat.”

• “In the aftermath of a heated conversation, bad ideas travel at the speed of light.”

• “Without a slavish adherence to the faddish certainties of yesteryear (in fact, with an instinctive suspicion of them), she had an interest in the world—and those invisible, immutable laws that actually spin it on its axis and keep us from flinging into space.”

• “All those voices in Burbank and Beverly Hills rising like a tide until they washed over the levees and flooded toward the sea, threatening to tear up all the palm trees and personas.”

• “Then the two continued their progress past the roller coaster toward the very end of the pier, where they could see the oceangoing casinos bobbing outside the city limits. And it felt to Olivia as if the continent was being tilted and all of California was going to slip into the sea. And though she couldn’t remember the exact reference, and whether it was from mythology or the Bible, she knew instinctively as they approached the pier’s limit that no matter what happened she mustn’t look back.”

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Other Stuff I’m Into Right Now:

• Fancy hand soap

• Jake Gyllenhaal’s early work

• Waking up early

• OPI’s Don’t Bossa Nova Me Around