Book Clubs

Passages from various books in my library that were published in the 1930s.

“This very good first novel about striving and surviving in Depression-era Manhattan deserves attention…The great strength of Rules of Civility is in the sharp, sure-handed…evocation of Manhattan in the late ‘30s…  Advance reviews of Mr. Towles’s novel have rarely failed to bring up F. Scott’s name. Who needs such burdensome comparisons? On the evidence of “Rules of…

United Kingdom Sceptre July 2011 Germany Graf Verlag March 2011 France Albin Michel 2012 Italy Neri Pozza October 2011 Spain Salamandra 2012 Netherlands Orlando January 2012 Sweden Bokforlaget Forum August 2011 Finland WSOY Fall 2012 Norway August 2012 Israel Modan Fall 2012 China Shanghai 99 July 2012

Five years ago, three friends and I set out to read some of the “great books” – or those works of literature which would merit re-reading several times over the course of our lives. We started with Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and have since worked through the works of Twain and Faulkner, Cervantes and Marquez,…

Below are some answers to commonly asked questions about RULES OF CIVILITY. If you’re interested in seeing one of my original presentations on the book you can find the speech here and the Q&A here. Commentary on the role of Walker Evans’s photography in the book is included here. Commentary on the role of jazz…

I have created an extensive playlist of music from roughly 1935-1945 that spans this transition. While jazz is not central to the narrative of Rules of Civility, the music and its various formulations are an important component of the book’s backdrop.

While I began writing Rules of Civility in 2006, the genesis of the book dates back to the early 1990s when I happened upon a copy of Many Are Called, the collection of portraits that Walker Evan took on the New York City subways in the late 1930s with a hidden camera.

What follows is a brief anecdotal history of the Metropol Hotel - but for a glimpse of the hotel today, you can watch the interview that ran on CBS Sunday Morning with me and CBS senior correspondent (and former Moscow bureau chief), Liz Palmer.

This unique map by Alex Coulter was commissioned for A Gentleman in Moscow. You can also see the contemporary Google map.

My interest in writing about the early twentieth century is neither a reflection of a love of history, nor a nostalgia for a bygone era. What has attracted me to the period is that it has a proximate distance to the present. It is near enough in time that it seems familiar to most readers, but far enough away that they have no firsthand knowledge of what actually happened. This provides me with the liberty to explore the narrow border between the unbelievably actual and the convincingly imagined.