Self Portraits

"What an amazing, glittering, glowing, Proustian, Conradian, Borgesian, diamond-faceted, language-studded, myth-drowned Dream!"---Cynthia Ozick

"Frederic Tuten's self-portraits are beautifully made stories, at once experimental and deeply old-fashioned, filled with wry observations, connections through time and history---his own and ours---along with the forever delicate dance between men and women. There is an artful elegance to his prose, playfully doused in art history, literary and filmic references, and philosophical inclinations. You have to lean forward and listen to these stories, wonderful amalgams of fact and fiction, melancholic memories and joyous celebrations---all of it the stuff of life--- and perfect reading."---A.M. Homes

"What a joy rida this book is! I'm caught up in its veerings and swervings, its jazzy improvisations and woundrous plot-play. It's all delicious and essential Tuten."---Edmund White

"Delicious, profound, droll, tender. I love its undertone of departure, melancholy---sadness, at confronting the unrepresentable."---Wayne Koestenbaum

"Frederic Tuten is a valiant writer whose work honors literature."---Susan Sontag

In these glittering, interrelated stories, a young boy barters with pirates for his grandmother's soul; Death appears as a genial waiter in a bar across from the Metropolitan Museum; an ominous man interferes with honeymooners at a bullfight; an estranged couple glimpse God on a cliff on Old Mountain in Tangiers; a lonely man lectures circus bears on the history of art; miniature glaciers tumble from a refrigerator in an East Village apartment, heralding a voyage to Antarctica on a frozen schooner anchored in Tompkins Square Park; and two lovers meet, part, and reunite time and again in different guises, ages, and landscapes both familiar and exotic.

Love, and its mystery, is at the core of these tales, but love also for art, for adventure, and for the passion of being alive. Throughout Self Portraits the author appears as hero, bystander, artist, and ghost, revealing an enchanting authobiography of the imagination.