![]() ![]() The characters are in their 20s, having just made it through the Depression. We witness a lot of drinking, smoking, and late-night jazz listening. In “Rules,” readers have no trouble believing in dinner at the 21 Club, watching the early morning runarounds at Belmont, living in a terraced apartment at the Beresford. (In America, wit and sparingly applied cunning ease things along.) ![]() In “Rules of Civility,” it is Katherine Kontent, a bright, young stenographer in New York City, who, during the course of 1938, advances both her social standing and her professional career through astute decision-making. (And luckily, he has sequestered a few gold pieces that come in handy.) His classical education and moral rectitude see him through. In “A Gentleman in Moscow, the figure is a count whom the Soviets place under a kind of “house-arrest” in the Metropol Hotel from which vantage point he witnesses the development of his homeland from 1920 to 1960. ![]() ![]() Each deals with an historical period, focusing on issues of class and deportment, embedding a protagonist in a carefully recreated setting and time frame. This is certainly the case for me with “Rules of Civility,” by Amor Towles, whose second novel, the run-away best seller “A Gentleman in Moscow,” is significantly more entertaining than the first. Sometimes it is best to read an author’s books in the order they are written. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Whether her close-knit family can forgive her for what she did eighteen months ago. Publication Date: ApGenres: Fiction, Romance Paperback: 448 pages Publisher: Penguin Books ISBN-10: 0143130153 ISBN-13. Or why the flat she's owned for a year still doesn't feel like home. Is there an appropriate way to behave in Mrs. Like how it is she's ended up working in an airport bar, spending every shift watching other people jet off to new places. She knows she likes working in The Buttered Bun teashop and she knows she might not love her boyfriend Patrick. She knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home. The international bestselling phenomenon Lou Clark knows lots of things. What Lou doesn't know is she's about to meet someone who's going to turn her whole life upside down. Discover the love story that captured 21 million hearts She knows how many miles lie between her new home in New York and her new boyfriend Sam in London.She knows her employer is a good man and she knows his wife is keeping a secret from him. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Winner of the the 2018 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay Winner of the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Related Work The collected best of Ursula’s blog, No Time to Spare presents perfectly crystallized dispatches on what mattered to her late in life, her concerns with the world, and her wonder at it: “How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. In her last great frontier of life, old age, she explored a new literary territory: the blog, a forum where she shined. Le Guin took readers to imaginary worlds for decades. ![]() On breakfast: “Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice, but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime.” On cultural perceptions of fantasy: “The direction of escape is toward freedom. Le Guin on the absurdity of denying your age: “If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub.” ![]() |