Party Stories

<p>Momentous parties have long provided dramatic scenes in fiction, from Natasha’s first ball in <i>War and Peace</i> to Lizzie meeting Darcy in <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> to J. Edgar Hoover consorting with Truman Capote in Don DeLillo’s ‘The Black and White Ball’.</p><p>Revelry can be revealing of character, as in Jay Gatsby’s extravagant bash in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s <i>The Great Gatsby</i> and the decadent partying of the jaded expats in Ernest Hemingway’s <i>The Sun Also Rises</i>. More decorous affairs can conceal profound depths, as in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ and the parties at the centre of two modernist masterpieces, Virginia Woolf’s <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i> and James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. Glamour with a gothic twist makes an appearance here in the fancy dress ball at Manderley from Daphne Du Maurier’s <i>Rebecca</i> and in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, at which Death himself is a guest.</p><p>But there is room on this dance floor for humour as well, in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Bella Fleace Gave a Party’, Dorothy Parker’s ‘Arrangement in Black & White’, Saki's ‘A Boar Pig’ and Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Pnin Gives a Party’. All kinds of literary greats consort in this festive gathering, a perfect gift for readers and partygoers alike.</p>