The Bar at Twilight

An incomparable storyteller serves up an enchanting concoction of art, love, and longing

"Frederic 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

In 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 admiresCezanne, Monet, Rousseaua man imagines how each vignette could be a life lesson for his wife, the artist he...