Table for Two

Table for Two is Amor Towles's 2024 short-fiction collection, his first short-form publication after three novels and the structural project that gives Rules of Civility readers the long-promised Eve Ross continuation. The structural premise is six contemporary New York stories (set across approximately the past fifteen years) plus the novella Eve in Hollywood, which picks up Eve Ross from the end of Rules of Civility (1938) as she arrives in Los Angeles by train and runs across the next several months of her Hollywood-era life. The six contemporary New York stories cover characters from the Towles catalog (a retired English teacher, a fact-checker at the New Yorker, the daughter of a wealthy Russian family) across small-stakes contemporary New York settings.

Towles's structural method in the contemporary New York stories is the patient short-fiction register that contemporary American literary commercial fiction has not historically committed to in single-author collections of this size. The Eve-in-Hollywood novella is the structural emotional center of the volume; it gives Rules of Civility readers what they have been asking for since 2011 (Eve's full Hollywood-era arc through the Olivia de Havilland subplot, the encounter with the actor Prentice Symmonds, and the eventual resolution that the 1938 New York frame of Rules of Civility had pointed at without delivering). The novella reads in the patient period-Hollywood register that contemporary American historical-fiction has been working toward and that A Gentleman in Moscow refined across its broader catalog. Most Towles readers will find the Eve in Hollywood novella the justification for the entire collection.

Recommended for Towles's growing literary commercial audience, for Rules of Civility readers who have been waiting for the Eve continuation, and as the right Towles short-fiction entry point. The Edoardo Ballerini / J. Smith-Cameron / Rebecca Lowman ensemble audiobook is the definitive audio production. Four solid stars.