“A l****ove 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 t...

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 b...

"An amazing, glittering, glowing, Proustian, Conradian, Borgesian, diamond-faceted, language-studded, myth-drowned Dream!"—Cynthia OzickThese 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 r...

In this elegant and sensual novel, Frederic Tuten explores the ageless tension between a life of passion and a desire for ease. Set in Paris and New York, The Green Hour tells the story of Dominique, an art historian who struggles to choose between two men who embody the critical schism in her life: unquenchable idealism and material happiness.The novel etches the career of this extraordinary woman from her rebellious college years to the present. What unfolds is a passion...