If any writer should feel confident about releasing a new book into the world, it’s Amor Towles. Towles’ three novels (“Rules of Civility,” “A Gentleman in Moscow” and “The Lincoln Highway”) have sold a combined six million copies and been translated into 30 languages. “Moscow” was turned into an acclaimed series starring Ewan McGregor that’s now on Showtime.
Yet those were novels. Towles’ new book, “Table for Two” is a short story collection. For some reason, people don’t read short stories the way they do novels.
“The shorter it gets, the harder it is for people to read,” Towles said. “They tell you right off the bat that whatever your normal audience for your novels, you should expect 1/10th of that to show up for your short stories. But that’s helpful to know in advance, have a sense of the built-in disinterest for the short story as a form.”
“Table,” six short stories and a novella, has been well-received, and hit No. 2 on the New York Times’ Hardcover Fiction Best Seller list on the week of its release. Among the stories are “The Line,” a wry Gogol-esque piece about a Russian farmer who is very good at waiting in lines (a useful skill under communism), “The Battle of Timmy Touchett,” a tale of literary skullduggery in ‘90s New York, and “Eve in Hollywood,” a novella that revisits a supporting character from “Rules of Civility.”
Towles will be in Madison on Tuesday, April 30 at 7 p.m. at the Orpheum Theater, 216 State St., to talk with Madison author Christina Clancy (“Shoulder Season”) about his books. The Wisconsin Book Festival-sponsored event is free, and audience members will get a pre-signed copy of “Table for Two” with admission.
Towles talked with the Cap Times about returning to the short story form, how involved he was in the “Moscow” TV series, and what he has in common with that Russian farmer. This transcript has been edited and condensed.
Amor Towles’ new book is “Table for Two,” a collection of six short stories and a novella.
Do you enjoy going on book tours?
Is this off the record? (Laughs). We’re in an era where if your book is not well-received, you’re not invited to go anywhere. And if you were invited, you shouldn’t go. So the book tour only exists if your book is well-received, or if you have an audience who is looking forward to your work. You’re very lucky as an author to have that.
When I toured for “Rules of Civility” a little over 10 years ago, I was lucky to have 20 people in the room. Now I can speak to 600, 800, 1,000 people at a time, and that’s a very fortunate position to be in. It is wearing to travel, to be away from your family and away from your work. But I wouldn’t stop doing it. I think it’s an important and satisfying part of the writing cycle.
How are people responding to this collection after three successful novels?
I started writing fiction as a kid, and I wrote fiction in high school, at Yale, and in graduate school at Stanford where I had a fiction writing fellowship. All that was short story work, which is not uncommon. If you’re going to experiment with different ways of doing setting, plot, styles of language, structure, different tones of voice, it’s much easier to do that in the short stories. You can do 10 different stories in 10 different ways, and have a much richer learning experience than if you committed to a novel for four years, only to learn that you made a mistake.
So I had some short stories published when I was 25, and then nothing for 20 years, mostly because I had a hiatus when I worked in the investment field. When I decided to submit these stories for publication, I was really anxious, to be honest. You’re anxious as a writer anytime you’re sharing something different with the audience, something that is not what they’re expecting. You also have less confidence that it’s going to hit its mark artistically.
About two months before publication, you get your first glimpse of what an independent party thinks about it. It’s been largely a pleasant surprise. People have enjoyed it in a way that exceeded my expectations or my hope.
What was it like to return to that form after writing three successful novels?
It was fun. I wrote all of this in the last 10 years, and I wrote a lot of it in the last two years. I tend to write short stories in between novels, particularly on the road. I can’t work on a novel effectively while I’m talking about the last novel, getting on planes, going from town to town. It’s too distracting. I really like to immerse myself in my work when doing a novel.
Ewan McGregor stars in the television adaptation of Amor Towles’ “A Gentleman in Moscow.”
I’m enjoying “A Gentleman in Moscow” on Showtime. How much input did you have into that, or want to have?
That was an evolution for me. I had moments early on in the process where I was thinking I should really get involved. At one point, they hired me to write a draft of the pilot and there was talk about me being in the writers’ room.
But I had a great discovery, and that discovery was that I am not a collaborator. Writing a novel, I am a committee of one, and it’s delightful. I recognized pretty early on that I was not going to be a productive member of a collaborative team to bring this to fruition.
And they were great about it. The team who produced “Gentleman in Moscow” said “We’ll give you a veto over who we hired to write it, who we hire to direct it, and the lead actor and the lead actress.” You get to interview them and hear their vision, and if you’re impressed with them, all we ask is that you step back and let everyone do their job.
That was the right attitude and very liberating for me. Because I went on to write “The Lincoln Highway” in the time that they were writing the drafts for the series, That was a better use of my time artistically and mentally, and for my readers.
There’s a line in the opening story, “The Line,” where the third-person narrator says of its farmer protagonist that, “The wisdom of the peasant is founded on one central axiom: While wars may come and go, empires rise and fall, and popular attitudes wax and wane, the furrow is the furrow.” Is that how you view writing?
That’s a very interesting observation. You’re right about that. The furrow in the soil and a line of prose are a perfect match. You’re going back and forth with these lines, just like lines on a page. There’s a certain amount of drudgery attached to writing and editing, which you just have to go over and over and over and over and trust that it’s going to be good. You can kind of get into the meditative state as the farmer would.
I think what you’re also pointing to in that line is the scope and tone of it and the context in which it is in the book. I often think of my books and how they relate to events, or, should I say, how little they relate to events. Like, wow, what am I going to do about Trump? Or about gun control or the divisiveness in societies and all the things we’re living through? Do I sign a petition? Do I march? No, I think I go back and write a story about a guy playing chess with his daughter. And I’m just going to hope that it works out alright.
Whatever a reader takes from that story is up to them.
You hope that your books have a life beyond the binding. That someone is affected by it, that it changes the way they see the world, that they have an emotional experience that they want to share with a sibling or a lover. That they encourage someone to read the book and have the same experience they had.
You hope for that. But I don’t have any hopes in terms of what it means to them specifically, no less than I could if someone asked me “What’s the book ‘about’?” If I could tell you what one of my books is “about,” then it’s a failure as a book.
