Life-jolting chance encounters and money—its absence, its abundance, its magical properties—animate “Table for Two,” Amor Towles’s collection of short stories. The subtitle calls them “fictions.” It’s ...

In his 2023 book The Art Thief, author Michael Finkel crucially observed (my book review here) that “art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure of all.” So true, and it raises an exciting ...

For all of Amor Towles’s literary strengths, he hasn’t shown much interest in character transformation. America’s favorite Russian patrician, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, begins “A Gentleman in ...

“Table for Two” is a collection of six stories and a novella set in two very different cultural capitals. By Hamilton Cain Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of “This Boy’s Faith: Notes ...

Amor Towles has transported readers to a hotel in a changing Russia ("A Gentleman in Moscow") and the roads of the U.S. in the 1950's ("The Lincoln Highway," a Read With Jenna pick). For his next book ...