My rating:
add to my books
Loading...
Tales of the Jazz Age
The taller of the two was named Carrol Key, a name hinting that in his veins, however thinly diluted by generations of degeneration, ran blood of some potentiality. But one could stare endlessly at the long, chinless face, the dull, watery eyes, and high cheek-bones, without finding suggestion of either ancestral worth or native resourcefulness.
Paperback
Published
by Kessinger Publishing
(first published 1922)
There is a good chance some of your friends read this book. Sign in to see!
sign in »
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
This book is currently not featured on any Listopia lists.
Add this book to your favorite list »
Community Reviews
(showing
1-30
of
1,862)
Jazz Age Stories is like a sampler platter of F. Scott Fitzgerald for the uninitiated. The Ice Palace, May Day, and The Offshore Pirate are all classic Fitzgerald stories and, along with the completely bizarre Mr. Icky play, the highlights of this collection. The others range from good but slight (Benediction, Dayrimple Goes Wrong) to the just plain awful - The Cut Glass Bowl being the most overblown, melodramatic Fitzgerald I've ever read, and Jemina, the Mountain Girl left me anything but mi...more
In the past 3 years, I've been drawn to reading more and more of F. Scott Fitzgerald's work.
Like many other teenagers, I read The Great Gatsby in high school and loved it. At the time, I remember my teacher telling us that much of Fitzgerald's other work was not as highly regarded, and that he was driven to produce short stories et al to fund his lifestyle.
I was surprised, then, at how impressed I was with his last, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, which I red for a fi...more
Like many other teenagers, I read The Great Gatsby in high school and loved it. At the time, I remember my teacher telling us that much of Fitzgerald's other work was not as highly regarded, and that he was driven to produce short stories et al to fund his lifestyle.
I was surprised, then, at how impressed I was with his last, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, which I red for a fi...more
After starting off quite promisingly with "The Jelly Bean," a format I hoped Fitzgerald would follow, the bulk of the stories presented in Tales of the Jazz Age just kind of flub and falter, occasionally approaching brilliance but more often than not settling for being entertaining. An exception to this is perhaps the extremely competent and dynamic (if a little overlong) "May Day," which works with the rich people/poor people plotline that Fitzgerald later explored in more, ...more
This is a collection of some of Fitzgerald's lesser known short stories. This edition was a free download to my Kindle reader and I was a little frustrated that nowhere in it's description was there a list of stories. As best as I can tell this is a complete list of titles:
1. The Jelly-Bean
2. The Camel's Back
3. May Day
4. Porcelain and Pink
5. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
6. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
7. Tarquin of Cheapside
8. O Russet Wit...more
1. The Jelly-Bean
2. The Camel's Back
3. May Day
4. Porcelain and Pink
5. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
6. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
7. Tarquin of Cheapside
8. O Russet Wit...more
This is a collection of Fitzgerald's short stories seperated into 3 categories. Flappers, fantasies, and some other stuff.
Having only read The Great Gatsby before, I was drawn to Fitzgerald and his Flapper stories. He practically created the craze, and lived it himself. I'd read a book about Flappers not long ago (Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex Style Celebrity and the Women Who Made America Modern), and that was really what I wanted out of the short stories.
Since what I w...more
Having only read The Great Gatsby before, I was drawn to Fitzgerald and his Flapper stories. He practically created the craze, and lived it himself. I'd read a book about Flappers not long ago (Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex Style Celebrity and the Women Who Made America Modern), and that was really what I wanted out of the short stories.
Since what I w...more
view 1 comment
Newton Compton e minimum fax: nel 2011 sono stati ripubblicati da queste due case editrici I racconti dell’età del jazz, dunque Francis Scott Fitzgerald è morto nel 1940. Il calcolo è semplice: se la legge sul diritto d’Autore prevede che i privilegi patrimoniali decadano al settantesimo anno dalla morte del creatore del testo letterario, ecco che allo scoccare di questa fatidica scadenza è aperta a chiunque la possibilità di riproporre un libro ritenuto valido e meritevole di entrare a far part...more
These short stories possess awfully self-absorbed and pretentious characters. Interestingly enough, this was my first encounter with Fitzgerald. Might be my last, though I'm aware that 'Great Gatsby' is supposedly his magnum opus.
The stories are entertaining but of abysmal personnel. "The Four Fists" is decent and moralistic. Towards the end of the collection, I found myself racing to the finish. Never a good sign.
His writing is superb. It's just the content th...more
The stories are entertaining but of abysmal personnel. "The Four Fists" is decent and moralistic. Towards the end of the collection, I found myself racing to the finish. Never a good sign.
His writing is superb. It's just the content th...more
An excellent sampler of Fitzgerald's early work, containing all of Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers. Quite uneven, with some of Fitzgerald's best work ("A Diamond As Big As The Ritz," "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," etc.) side by side with some really skippable stuff ("Mr. Icky" and "Tarquin of Cheapside" notably). All in all, Jazz Age Stories is not nearly as good as This Side of Paradise or The Great Gatsby, but it is an invaluable look int...more
A mix of some very good and some kind of strange work from the pen of F. Scott. The latter half of this collection presents some odd selections which seem to hail, primarily, from his earlier years at Princeton. There are two one act plays and a couple of shorts that are more concerned with the phrasing than the plot, and some of them work better than others. While I disliked "Mr. Icky" and didn't appreciate any of its strange humour, the other drama, "Porcelain and Pink", wa...more
Considering I didn't like The Great Gatsby, I'm amazed at how I'm loving the other works of F. Scott Fitzgerald so far! I read This Side Of Paradise and was enthralled, and this book of short stories was equal parts enchanting and intelligent. I read it on my Kindle, and I ended up highlighting a lot of sentences and passages because they were so beautifully written.
The book includes "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which is nowhere near as complex a story as the ...more
The book includes "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which is nowhere near as complex a story as the ...more
"The Crack Up" is a sad story of a man really busting his balls to prove to himself and to those around him that his life work isn't a hack waste.
This is another short book - I love these quick read pocket books - by a good author that can be used as a short, very short, introduction to the themes in his work. It's mostly essays about the twenties as opposed to short stories, but it's solid nonetheless. Fitzgerald is someone that I both admire, for the spark like quality ...more
This is another short book - I love these quick read pocket books - by a good author that can be used as a short, very short, introduction to the themes in his work. It's mostly essays about the twenties as opposed to short stories, but it's solid nonetheless. Fitzgerald is someone that I both admire, for the spark like quality ...more
I'm really starting to wonder why everything that Fitzgerald wrote was wretched and puerile with the exception of Gatsby, which was magnificent. Tales of the Jazz age is not a good collection of stories. None of them are entertaining or evocative, and there's something fundamentally shallow and cruel about the way Fitzgerald writes his characters. It's difficult to figure whether he's just a jaded misanthrope or just can't write his characters in a way to make them even a little bit sympathet...more
Fitzgerald (arch-nemesis?) I haven't read you since high school, but for the sake of this grad class, can we get along just this once?
Edit: Well, I can appreciate you as an author, Mr. Fitzgerald. I'll give you that. Your writing still seems to have the same theme with each story: class, money, and everyone is miserable. The rich are miserable because they have too much money and the poor are miserable because they don't have enough money. I get this, but you still haven't blown me...more
Edit: Well, I can appreciate you as an author, Mr. Fitzgerald. I'll give you that. Your writing still seems to have the same theme with each story: class, money, and everyone is miserable. The rich are miserable because they have too much money and the poor are miserable because they don't have enough money. I get this, but you still haven't blown me...more
Fitzgerald's short stories are amusing, but not particularly resonant with me. That being said, they were enjoyable reads, but not 'literature'. And I don't think Fitzgerald meant them to be, judging by a tongue in cheek evaluation of a character in 'The Lees of Happiness' who happens to be a writer very much resembling Fitzgerald. It was clear that the bulk of them were played up for humorous effect. I will say I was disappointed with 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' (the movie was muc...more
I had been planning to read The Great Gatsby for years and picked up a copy when I was browsing a soon-to-close local Borders. This book was next to it, so I scooped up a copy of this as well. I'm probably the last person on the planet to fall in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald. What a writer! His sentences are so finely crafted and the stories are jewels to treasure. He so captures the era in which he wrote -- at least as far as I can tell. 0
I find his writing style friendly and benign, if not quite overwhelmingly brilliant as it is often made out to be. The story was darker and more interesting than whatever the hell that was they came up with in the movie. I mean, I liked the movie, but it was a completely different story. The others weren't particularly noteworthy. Not a fan of happy endings, Mr. Fitzgerald.
It's hard to rate a book of short stories because some of them are 4 star, most are 3 star, and a couple are 2 star. "May Day" was the best of the bunch. It's a pretty wild mix of stories--from straight comedy to political satire and social comment. You can tell from every romantic relationship in the stories what a nut job Zelda was.
Fitzgerald's short stories from his earlier years, well early
as most folks start with Gatsby. If you've already read these,
which include 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button', then when you
heard about the 3 hour movie, you probably pondered -
how'd they get 3 hours out of that?
I only read one story from this book. I read The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It was very short and there was no development of the characters. Benjamin lived a sad, lonely life with no one really caring for him. His family didn't even care for him. Not worth reading.
The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite novels of all time, so I was kind of bummed to find this collection of short stories—the first examples of Fitzgerald’s short fiction I’ve read since high school—rather underwhelming. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood, but nothing in here electrified me the way Gatsby does, and I began to feel sodden from such a deluge of stories about unpleasant women. Poor Scott; your issues are showing, man.
It was interesting to read “The Curious Case of...more
It was interesting to read “The Curious Case of...more
In this short story in this collection - Three Hours Between Planes - Fitzgerald handled this delicate story of first love brilliantly, springing out the surprise only towards the end.
He certainly knows how to tell a good story.
He certainly knows how to tell a good story.
I've been wanting to read this collection for a while because it contained the short story "Benjamin Button", upon which the movie was based. Unfortunately, I was fairly disappointed in that particular story, as it felt so inconsequential and lackluster.
There were a few stories I did enjoy, namely, "The Camel's Back", "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz", and "The Lees of Happiness". I'm not sure these particular stories make up for the disappointm...more
There were a few stories I did enjoy, namely, "The Camel's Back", "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz", and "The Lees of Happiness". I'm not sure these particular stories make up for the disappointm...more
I don't recall ever reading anything of F. Scott Fitzgerald's writings, before. Now that I have, prompted by the movie 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button', which was based on Fitzgerald's short story of the same name (included in this volume), I will count him among my favorite (short) story tellers; along with O'Henry, Mark Twain and T.C. Boyle.
The first two stories included in the 'Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories'. i.e. 'The Jelly-Bean' and 'The Camel's Back' are jus...more
The first two stories included in the 'Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories'. i.e. 'The Jelly-Bean' and 'The Camel's Back' are jus...more
Uneven collection. A couple of these stories are really bad. I had always heard that Fitzgerald thought of short stories as a way to make money, and poured his art into his novels. Or something like that. That said, some of these are amazing and worth reading. "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is a weird, weird story, almost science fiction. "May Day" is catastrophically depressing (especially if you're an illustrator, ha!), but beautifully written. I can't remember what the s...more
Haven't been a fan of Fitzgerald in the past, but I've found these stories to be enjoyable, tender and satiric in a way that reminds me of Austen, actually.
Love the story line, it fits well with history. It is a history book but not written in boring textbook form...it is a very loving true story.
Worth another read, individual stories range in quality but on balance entertaining. Short stories can be quite refreshing.
A full online copy of this book is available from Google Books. I noticed a few typos, but the price was right.
Had wanted to read this for a while and expected something a little different. Sadly, it was uninteresting to me.
Im a huge fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but did find this collection disappointing. Of the 11 short stories, only 3 really held up to my standards of Fitzgerald. I purchase this book for The Strange Case of Benjamin Buttons to see how the current movie held up to the short story. The story was great, and very unique for its time. I also really enjoyed A Diamond as Big as the Ritz and May Day. Each story had an introduction by Fitzgerald himself, but frankly, they were pretty disappointing a...more
There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one »
Readers Also Enjoyed
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American writer of novels and short stories, whose works have been seen as evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he himself allegedly coined. He is regarded as one of the greatest twentieth century writers. Fitzgerald was of the self-styled "Lost Generation," Americans born in the 1890s who came of age during World War I. He finished four novels, left a fi...more
More about F. Scott Fitzgerald...
Share This Book
No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »
“He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.”
—
8 people liked it
“Think of all the fine men we should lose is suicide were not so cowardly”
—
2 people liked it
More quotes…
