This sophisticated short story by award winning and best selling author Amor Towles is at once playful and unsettling. He brings his reader into the rarefied, but imperfect space of cultured New York and cannot help but expose the flaws embedded at its core. On what was meant to be a happy date, a young investment banker takes his wife to Carnegie Hall and observes an elderly man secretly recording the concert. His indignation is not without consequence.
Amor Towles is an American writer known for his bestselling novels Rules of Civility (2011), A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), and The Lincoln Highway (2021). He was born and raised near Boston, Massachusetts. From there he graduated from Yale and received an MA in English from Stanford. For over 20 years Towles worked in finance before releasing his first novel, Rules of Civility, which received raving reviews beyond his expectations and propelled him to devote himself entirely to writing.
Collectively his novels Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, and The Lincoln Highway, and his recent collection of shorter fiction Table for Two have sold more than six million copies and have been translated into more than thirty languages. This short story The Bootlegger was originally published in his collection Table for Two (2024). Christian House of the Financial Times writes, “The Bootlegger” is “a near perfect examination of the pitfalls of righteous indignation.”
