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The author of False Gods and winner of the National Medal of Arts offers eight stories looking into the lives of the wealthy—but troubled—elite. Set in various decades throughout twentieth century, this entertaining short story collection reveals the inner lives of America’s upper classes in the polished, elegant prose that is Louis Auchincloss’s signature. The intricate balance of power in a marriage, the artist’s hunger for inspiration, the responsibilities of privileged youth on the eve of war—Auchincloss casts a knowing yet sympathetic eye on such dilemmas as they play themselves out in the salons, clubs, boarding schools, Park Avenue drawing rooms, and summer hideaways of the moneyed classes. In “The Man of Good Will,” an aging Seth Middletown finds himself unable to save a beloved grandson torn apart by the sixties — a boy carefully protected from a family secret. Dick and Joyce Emmons, in “The Lotos Eaters,” are surprised to find their new marriage subtly undermined by their own enchanted existence on a paradisal Florida island. A theatrical grande dame and an admiring young actor are “Priestess and Acolyte” —until they realize that the passions that rule them are irreconcilable. Evident on every page of the eight stories contained here are Auchincloss’s superb ear for dialogue and his ability to suggest what lies beneath the surface of human relationships. Tales of Yesteryear will give Auchincloss’s loyal readers cause to rejoice, and newcomers a delightful introduction to one of America's most distinguished authors. Praise for Tales of Yesteryear “His word is as graceful and insightful as it’s ever been. These eight stories, with their familiar social types and elegant settings, are vintage Auchincloss: moral tales that resonate with the history of our times, albeit from the top down . . . . Auchincloss belongs among the masters of American short fiction, as this volume demonstrates.” —Kirkus Reviews “Auchincloss’s keen social observation, pitch-perfect dialogue and gift for dramatic confrontation are as effective as ever.” —Publishers Weekly
Gregor von Rezzori was born in Czernowitz, a onetime provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was later to be absorbed successively into Romania, the USSR, and the Ukraine—a town that was everywhere and nowhere, with a population of astonishing diversity. Growing up after World War I and the collapse of the empire, Rezzori lived in a twilit world suspended between the formalities of the old nineteenth-century order which had shaped his aristocratic parents and the innovations, uncertainties, and raw terror of the new century. The haunted atmosphere of this dying world is beautifully rendered in the pages of The Snows of Yesteryear. The book is a series of portraits—amused, fond, sometimes appalling—of Rezzori’s family: his hysterical and histrionic mother, disappointed by marriage, destructively obsessed with her children’s health and breeding; his father, a flinty reactionary, whose only real love was hunting; his haughty older sister, fated to die before thirty; his earthy nursemaid, who introduced Rezzori to the power of storytelling and the inevitability of death; and a beloved governess, Bunchy. Telling their stories, Rezzori tells his own, holding his early life to the light like a crystal until it shines for us with a prismatic brilliance.
In the early nineteenth century, Capt Young, an intrepid official of the East India Company arrived in Landour, was charmed by the gentle climate-an indispensable relief from the heat of the plains down below-and built a shooting lodge in Mullingar. 'Like meat, we keep better here,' gushed Lady Emily Eden - 'The climate! No wonder I could not live In the spring of 1808, Captain Hyder Jung Hearsey and Captain Felix Raper became the first visitors to get a view of the Garhwal Himalayas from the bend near Lal Tibba in Landour. For centuries the Himalayan foothills have been