Join Amor Towles at an elegant `Table for Two'

Opening a book by Amor Towles is like walking into your favorite fine restaurant — you know everything is going to be delicious.

So the title of his new collection, “Table for Two: Fictions,” and the jacket's elegant black-and-white image of a welldressed couple sipping afterdinner drinks sets just the right mood. And the six short stories and one novella within are seven courses of satisfaction.

This book shares some elements with Towles' hugely popular 2016 bestseller, “A Gentleman in Moscow” (now a Showtime series). The six stories are set in New York City, the novella in Los Angeles, but all of them hover around the edges of upper-class luxury with their tales of outsiders and what they might do to get inside.

For the first story, “The

Line,” Towles harks back to the setting of “Gentleman.” It's a sort of fable about “a peasant named Pushkin” and his wife, who live on a farm outside Moscow. Pushkin considers himself a humbly happy man. “And,” Towles writes, “we all know exactly where that kind of happiness leads.”

As Russia turns to communism, Pushkin's wife, Irina, turns passionately political, and he goes along for the ride — even when she announces they're moving to Moscow. She becomes a successful apparatchik, and Pushkin discovers his aptitude for a job that brings him a surprising income in the communist economy: He stands in lines.

And when, after a series of unpredictable events, the pair land in New York City, it still serves him well.

“The Ballad of Timothy Touchett” is the sly tale of the serious young man of the title, who is sure he is destined to be a great novelist but doesn't seem to be able to write anything. What he does have is a knack for copying the signatures of great novelists. That seems like poor solace, until Timothy meets an old man named Peter Pennybrook, who notices him in the library copying F. Scott Fitzgerald's signature over and over.

Pennybrook is full of fascinating stories about his acquaintances with famous writers. He also owns a rare book shop, a tiny place that doesn't turn much of a profit — until his stock of signed first editions suddenly grows.

Pennybrook overcomes Timothy's moral qualms about the signatures by spinning stories about the deserving literary fans who will own them, and by only asking him to sign books by deceased writers. He takes it too far, though, when he asks Timothy to sign “The New York Trilogy” by the very much alive Paul Auster. “Mr. Pennybrook, it seems, knew a mother superior in Garrison, New York, who was a lover of Auster's work, but who rarely passed beyond the walls of her nunnery.”

In “Hasta Luego,” Jerry, a business traveler, is stuck in LaGuardia during a snowstorm just before Christmas, along with throngs of other passengers.

But one man stands out, a man who “emanated an unmistakable sense of goodwill.” He calls himself Smitty, and he is soon everybody's new best friend, helpful and cheery and ready to party. Jerry is having an unexpected blast, until he accidentally answers a call on Smitty's phone.