The Jazz Age is over, the Depression in its final days, World War II just over the horizon.

The story unfolds largely in flashback, set on New Year’s Eve in Manhattan 1937. It’s a nostalgic love letter to New York of the late ’30s, a novel of manners with lofty aspirations that evokes some of the classics of American literature. Written by first-time novelist Amor Towles, a principal at a Manhattan investment firm, the book has shot up the best-seller charts and is drawing rave reviews from critics. “As for Clothing”, Towles’s essay on Walden, appears in the anthology Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau.Īuthor photo taken by Dmitri Kasterine in Garrison, NY.Pour yourself a cold martini, make sure it’s extra dry, put some classic jazz on the stereo, a mournful saxophone is a must, and settle in with one of the best-reviewed novels of the year, “Rules of Civility.” Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Nightand the Penguin Classics edition of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

Towles wrote the introduction to Scribner’s 75th anniversary edition of F. Access to some of these stories as well as a few short essays can be found in the Other Writing section of this website. Towles’s short stories have appeared in the Paris Review (#112), Granta (#148), British Vogue, and Audible Originals. The Lincoln Highway (2021) debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The book’s French translation received the 2012 Prix Fitzgerald.Ī Gentleman in Moscow (2016) was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years and was named one of the best books of 2016 by the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR. Rules of Civility (2011) was a New York Times bestseller and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of the year. Both Bill Gates and President Barack Obama included A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway on their annual book recommendation lists. His novels Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, and The Lincoln Highway have collectively sold more than six million copies and been translated into more than thirty languages. Having worked as an investment professional for over twenty years, he now devotes himself full time to writing in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife and two children. Born and raised in the Boston area, Amor Towles graduated from Yale College and received an MA in English from Stanford University.

Rules of civility review