The Young Apollo and Other Stories

By Louis Auchincloss

Fiction : Short Stories (single author)

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date: April 2006

ISBN: 9780547760612

Digital Book format: ePub (Adobe DRM)

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An evocative and elegant collection of new stories from an American master.

Bringing together twelve previously unpublished pieces, The Young Apollo and Other Stories sparkles with Auchincloss's singular style, and, like East Side Story, his most recent book, reveals in precise, aphoristic prose "not only the textures of this world but also its elemental and evolving truths" (New York Times). From Edwardian garden parties to the Manhattan demimonde of the 1970s, Auchincloss travels with economical grace and agility in this collection, which illuminates the moral ambiguities, both personal and professional, of New York’s moneyed class.

A loving chronicle of a waning world, this new collection is nonetheless an acute and gimlet-eyed portrait that refuses to shy away from its characters' less than savory ambitions and desires. In the title story, an older man eulogizes his young friend, the golden Lionel Manning--muse to the artists he gathered round himself and preserved forever in memory as the beautiful thirty-one-year-old man he was at death--only to reveal that despite Lionel’s burgeoning reputation as a poet, he could inspire genius but not produce it. The Young Apollo and Other Stories crystallizes a world now gone but forever fixed in our romantic imaginations, uncovering its flaws and all too human foibles, as well as its considerable charms.