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 Garden Party” and the parties at the center
of those two modernist masterpieces Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce’s “The
Dead.” 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 Rebecca 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. 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.
