Bar at Twilight

Frederic Tuten is the award-winning 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.

New York Times “Editors’ Choice” selectionNew York Magazine “Approval Matrix” selectionBOMB Magazine “Gift Guide” selection“Intoxicating.” —New York Magazine“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.” —New York Times Book Review“The Bar at Twilight is [Tuten’s] showcase, revisiting every strand of his bibliography with the benefit of hindsight and at the peak of his powers. . . . [It] is outgoing, lived-in, and gregarious. The word for this is generous.” —Bookforum“Tuten’s language is supple, elegant, and wonderfully descriptive. He is also very funny.” —Los Angeles Review of Books“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.” —Cleveland Review of Books“Subtly exultant. . . . The Bar at Twilight solidifies [Tuten’s] reputation as a distinctive, if overlooked, practitioner of literary art.” —East Hampton Star“Scintillating. . . . Tuten dazzles like the best of Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, and George Saunders. Here, with The Bar at Twilight, he is at the pinnacle of his craft.” —On the Seawall“The subtlety of [Tuten’s] storytelling is wonderful.” —North of Oxford“Heady and elegant. . . . The work of a gifted, resourceful writer: an old master.” —Kirkus Reviews“Heartfelt. . . . No matter whether Tuten is chronicling the creative or romantic lives of his characters, he renders their struggles with a sense of hope.” —Publishers Weekly“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“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