Party Stories
Everyone loves a party: this beautiful hardcover gathers a glittering array of famous celebrations by great writers past and present--from Austen, Tolstoy, Maupassant, and Nabokov to Alan Hollinghurst, Edna O'Brien, Don DeLillo, and Jhumpa Lahiri.
Momentous parties have long provided dramatic scenes in fiction, from Natasha’s first ball in War and Peace to Darcy snubbing Lizzy in Pride and Prejudice to J. Edgar Hoover and Truman Capote rubbing shoulders in Don DeLillo’s “The Black-and-White Ball.” Revelry can be revealing of character, as in Gatsby’s extravagant bash in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the decadent partying of the jaded expats in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. More decorous affairs can also reveal profound depths, as in Katherine Mansfield’s “The…