Starting Out in the Evening

Starting Out in the Evening

Brian Morton

WINNER OF THE KORET JEWISH BOOK AWARD
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
A PEN/FAULKNER AWARD NOMINEE
ONE OF PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

A friendship evolves between an aging author—whose identity is bound up with a vanished world of secular, urban, intellectually vigorous Jewish life—and a young grad student. By the acclaimed author of Florence Gordon, the novel’s Jewish cultural resonance was formally recognized when it was awarded the Koret Jewish Book Award for fiction.

Leonard Schiller is a novelist in his seventies, “one of the few surviving members of the Upper West Side Jewish intelligentsia of the 1940s and ‘50s,” a second-string but respectable talent who produced only a small handful of books.

Heather Wolfe is an attractive graduate student in her twenties. She read Schiller's novels when she was growing up and they changed her life. When the ambitious Heather decides to write her master's thesis about Schiller's work and sets out to meet him—convinced she can bring Schiller back into the literary world's spotlight—the unexpected consequences of their meeting alter everything in Schiller's ordered life.

What follows is a quasi-romantic friendship and intellectual engagement that investigates the meaning of art, fame, and personal connection. "Nothing less than a triumph," Starting Out in the Evening is Brian Morton's most widely acclaimed novel to date (The New York Times Book Review).

About the Author

Brian Morton is the author of four previous novels, including Starting Out in the Evening, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and was made into an acclaimed feature film, and A Window Across the River, which was a Book Club selection of the Today show. He teaches at New York University, the Bennington Writing Seminars, and Sarah Lawrence College, where he also directs the writing program. Morton lives in New York.

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