Party Stories

<b>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.</b><br><br>Momentous parties have long provided dramatic scenes in fiction, from Natasha’s first ball in <i>War and Peace </i>to Darcy snubbing Lizzy in <i>Pride and Prejudice </i>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 <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 also reveal profound depths, as in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” and the parties at the center of those two modernist masterpieces, Virginia Woolf’s <i>Mrs. Dalloway </i>and James Joyce’s “The Dead.”<br><br>There is room on this dance floor for humor, as well, in Evelyn Waugh’s “Bella Fleace Gave a Party,” Dorothy Parker’s “Arrangement in Black & White,” and Saki’s “The Boar-Pig.” Glamour with a gothic twist makes an entrance in the fateful costume ball in 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. All sorts of literary greats mingle in this festive gathering, a perfectly entertaining gift for readers and partygoers alike. <br><br>Everyman''s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.