Separate Hours (ePub)

An honest and elegant (if slightly disturbing) imagining of the way truth becomes elusive in long-term relationships.Separate Hoursis a love story about the betrayal of love.';Separate Hoursis a brilliantly told story of the collapse of a modern, ';enlightened' marriage. And though it's necessarily an account limned by sadness and pained regret, it manages at the same time to dissect the pretensions and self-absorption of an entire class of modern professional intellectuals, hoisting them on their own petards simply by letting those folks talk (and Lord, how they love to talk!), which makes the book very funny as well. This may be Baumbach's best book, a postmodern domestic comedy in which marriage is conflict and divorce resolution.' Russell BanksJonathan Baumbach is the author of fourteen books of fiction, includingYou, or The Invention of Memory;On the Way to My Father's Funeral: New and Selected Stories;B: A Novel;D-Tours;Separate Hours;Chez Charlotte and Emily;The Life and Times of Major Fiction;Reruns;Babble; andA Man to Conjure With. He has also published over ninety stories in such places asEsquire,Open City, andBoulevard.Baumbach, cofounder of the Fiction Collective in 1973, the first fiction writers cooperative in America, has seen his work widely praised. His short stories have been anthologized inBest American Short Stories,The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, andThe Best of TriQuarterly.TheNew York Times Book Reviewreferred to him in 2004 as ';an underappreciated writer. He employs a masterfully dispassionate, fiercely intelligent narrative voice whose seeming objectivity is always a faltering front for secret passion and despair.'