Frederic Tuten – författare

These mysterious, interrelated stories create a portrait of the author’s life, both real and imagined, as he appears in each tale variously as hero, bystander, artist, and ghost, yielding an enchanting autobiography of the imagination.Fantasy and reality collide as the book’s principal characters—two lovers—meet, part, and reunite, time and again, at different stages in life and in landscapes both familiar and exotic. Death appears as a genial waiter in a café across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art; talking circus elephants console a ringmaster for his unrequited love; a young boy barters with pirates for his grandmother’s soul; and as a refrigerator begins spilling mini-glaciers into a couple’s East Village apartment, a voyage to Antarctica commences on an icy schooner waiting for them in Tompkins Square Park.Love, and its mystery, is at the core of these self portraits, but love also for art, for adventure, and for the passion of being alive.

Set in Paris and New York, The Green Hour tells the story of Dominique, a brilliant art historian who has recently recovered from a bout with cancer. The novel follows Dominique from her college years to the present, unfolding a moving love story in which Dominique is torn between her passion for the idealistic and seductive Rex, who periodically disappears from her life, and her feelings for Eric, a wealthy American businessman deeply in love with her.Woven into this romance is the equally gripping tale of Dominique's relationship with art and the cultural turmoils of our time. By portraying a character for whom love and idealism are lost, this novel hauntingly shows us the importance of pursuing both. A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2002.

An icon of literature as American Pop Art, Frederic Tuten’s Adventures of Mao on the Long March is a triumphantly witty and subversive novel. The New York Times called it “almost too good to be true.” Tuten’s deadpan textbook narrative of Mao’s Long March is peppered with loving parodies of Hemingway, Kerouac, Dos Passos, and Malamud. As John Updike comments, the book includes “twenty-seven pages of straight history of the Long March (October 1934-October 1935), done in a neutral, factual tone, as by a fellow-traveling Readers Digest…thirty-six and a half pages of quotations in quotation marks…and twenty-six pages of what might be considered normal novelistic substance—imaginary encounters and conversation. For an example: ‘a tank, covered with peonies and laurels, advances towards him. Mao thinks the tank will crush him, but it clanks to a halt. The turret rises, hesitantly. Greta Garbo, dressed in red sealskin boots, red railway-man’s cap, and red satin coveralls, emerges. She speaks: “Mao, I have been bad in Moscow and wicked in Paris, I have been loved in every capital, but I have never seen a MAN whom I could love. That Man is you, Mao, Mao mine.” Mao considers this dialectically. The woman is clearly mad. Yet she is beautiful and the tank seems to work.‘”

“A love song to a lost New York” (New York magazine) from novelist, essayist, and critic Frederic Tuten as he recalls his personal and artistic coming-of-age in 1950s New York City, a defining period that would set him on the course to becoming a writer.Born in the Bronx to a Sicilian mother and Southern father, Frederic Tuten always dreamed of being an artist. Determined to trade his neighborhood streets for the romantic avenues of Paris, he learned to paint and draw, falling in love with the process of putting a brush to canvas and the feeling it gave him. At fifteen, he decided to leave high school and pursue the bohemian life he’d read about in books. But, before he could, he would receive an extraordinary education right in his own backyard. “A stirring portrait…and a wonderfully raw story of city boy’s transformation into a writer” (Publishers Weekly), My Young Life reveals Tuten’s early formative years where he would discover the kind of life he wanted to lead. As he travels downtown for classes at the Art Students League, spends afternoons reading in Union Square, and discovers the vibrant scenes of downtown galleries and Lower East Side bars, Frederic finds himself a member of a new community of artists, gathering friends, influences—and many girlfriends—along the way. Frederic Tuten has had a remarkable life, writing books, traveling around the world, acting in and creating films, and even conducting summer workshops with Paul Bowles in Tangiers. Spanning two decades and bringing us from his family’s kitchen table in the Bronx to the cafes of Greenwich Village and back again, My Young Life is an intimate and enchanting portrait of an artist’s coming-of-age, set against one of the most exciting creative periods of our time—“so thrilling…so precise in presenting a young man’s preoccupation and occupation” (Steve Martin).

“A love song to a lost New York” (New York magazine) from novelist, essayist, and critic Frederic Tuten as he recalls his personal and artistic coming-of-age in 1950s New York City, a defining period that would set him on the course to becoming a writer.Born in the Bronx to a Sicilian mother and Southern father, Frederic Tuten always dreamed of being an artist. Determined to trade his neighborhood streets for the romantic avenues of Paris, he learned to paint and draw, falling in love with the process of putting a brush to canvas and the feeling it gave him. At fifteen, he decided to leave high school and pursue the bohemian life he’d read about in books. But, before he could, he would receive an extraordinary education right in his own backyard. “A stirring portrait…and a wonderfully raw story of city boy’s transformation into a writer” (Publishers Weekly), My Young Life reveals Tuten’s early formative years where he would discover the kind of life he wanted to lead. As he travels downtown for classes at the Art Students League, spends afternoons reading in Union Square, and discovers the vibrant scenes of downtown galleries and Lower East Side bars, Frederic finds himself a member of a new community of artists, gathering friends, influences—and many girlfriends—along the way. Frederic Tuten has had a remarkable life, writing books, traveling around the world, acting in and creating films, and even conducting summer workshops with Paul Bowles in Tangiers. Spanning two decades and bringing us from his family’s kitchen table in the Bronx to the cafes of Greenwich Village and back again, My Young Life is an intimate and enchanting portrait of an artist’s coming-of-age, set against one of the most exciting creative periods of our time—“so thrilling…so precise in presenting a young man’s preoccupation and occupation” (Steve Martin).

The facsimile typewritten and annotated script of the 1981 cult classic, together with the shocking never-before-published screenplay that Hollywood refused to makeThe 1981 film Possession, directed by Polish filmmaker Andrzej Zulawski (1940–2016), is a no-holds-barred portrait of a disintegrating marriage. Featuring impassioned performances by Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill, the film starts as a psychodrama, develops quickly into a queasy supernatural horror film and ends up exploding all known genres. A work of rampant and sustained power, its visual daring is equaled by its rich imagination and deep spiritual conviction: a film for the bold and adventurous. Published for the first time as a facsimile of the typed script, Possession includes handwritten annotations and edits by screenwriters Zulawski and Frederic Tuten (born 1936). This typescript offers amazing insight into the creation of the cult film and is a fascinating document of collaboration between two outstanding artists. As an added bonus, this publication also includes Zulawski and Tuten's mysterious, never-before-published script for The Invisibles—a story that, though never filmed, is even darker and more complex than Possession.

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICEAn incomparable storyteller serves up an enchanting concoction of art, love, and longingIn fifteen masterful stories, Frederic Tuten entertains questions of existential magnitude, pervasive yearning, and the creative impulse. A wealthy older woman reflects on her relationship with her drowned husband, a painter, as she awaits her own watery demise. An exhausted artist, feeling stuck, reads a book of criticism about allegory and symbolism before tossing her paintings out the window. Writing a book about the lives of artists he admires—Cezanne, Monet, Rousseau—a man imagines how each vignette could be a life lesson for his wife, the artist he perhaps admires the most.Whether set in Tuten’s beloved Lower East Side, Rome’s Borghese Gardens, or a French seaside resort, these stories shift seamlessly between the poignancy of memory into the logic of fairytales or dreams, demonstrating Tuten’s exceptional ability to transmute his passion for art and life to the page.