Tales of the Jazz Age

Tales of the Jazz Age is a delightful, sobering, thought-provoking, and downright curious collection of 11 of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories, published after his first two novels - This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922) - but before The Great Gatsby (1925). In Tales of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald takes on the mystery and confusion of love: from Southern temptations ("The Jellybean") to humorous ("The Camel’s Back") to poignant ("The Lees of Happiness") to heartbreakingly cruel ("O Russet Witch") to gay-but-tempered in post-World War I New York, with its dark undertones of alcoholism, communism, a liberal press, and the treatment of returning veterans (May Day). Fitzgerald moves away from the real world and takes the listener into the fantasy of a gemstone that is, literally, the size of a mountain ("The Diamond as Big as the Ritz"), with echoes of H. G. Wells and rough government authority flying into the story. But, staying with fantasies, Fitzgerald also t