Tales of the Jazz Age

Fitzgerald was twenty-six when he assembled these stories, already the poet laureate of the Jazz Age and its most meticulous chronicler. This collection captures America in the years between the war and the crash, when everything felt possible and nothing quite was. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" opens the collection with its extraordinary premise, a man born old who grows young, and demonstrates Fitzgerald's gift for making the impossible feel inevitable. Other stories chronicle the wealthy, their parties, their restlessness, their quiet desperate searching. There's a softness here, a sheen of glamour, but also the first fine cracks in the edifice. Fitzgerald wrote these stories to pay the bills (he was famously profligate with money), but they're never merely commercial. They capture a moment in American life with an accuracy that still startles. For anyone who loved The Great Gatsby, these stories offer the same sensibility in miniature: the same lush prose, the same awareness that the party cannot last forever.