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You'll finish this book in no time. Loved the short stories from beginning to end. Enjoy and read more FSF if this is your first taste of him. The end result will be an experience with one of our country's greatest authors to ever grace a blank sheet of paper. It's a book that you'll not want to stop reading. The verbiage is very easy and flows like the river as you read through his works.
I bought this product to read "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and compare it with the movie of the same name.As I suspected, the story was much different than the movie.But I still got the other Fitzgerald stories, so that was a bonus.
It's fun to see the literary and thematic chances that he took as his career progressed. What I enjoy best about this book is seeing the experimentation of Fitzgerald's writing from one story to the next. You should buy this book. F Scott Fitzgerald is the greatest American author of the 20th Century. It's easy to see why with this collection of short stories.
It's quite frustrating. Pick up any page of Fitzgerald's contemporary, Thomas Wolfe, (specifically Look Homeward, Angel) and you'll see the difference. Indeed, one can argue that Fitzgerald was not a novelist at all and was, as he described himself, a writer who wanted to "preach at people." In any event, the Johnsonian dictum cited above seems to apply to Fitzgerald: He wrote much better when under some pecuniary deadline than otherwise. ----All this is to say, though I'm not a great fan of Fitzgerald's writing, some of these stories are worth any reader's while, and I shall list them:"Bernice Bobs Her Hair" p.25"Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar" p.237"Love In The Night" p.302"A Short Trip Home" p.372"The Swimmers" p.495"A New Leaf" p.634"Afternoon of An Author" p.734"The Lost Decade" p.747 These stories stand out for one of two reasons, they lack the strain put on the reader by the gossamer sketching described above, or, for a few of them, Fitzgerald actually manages to pull it off - a powerful or haunting story touching the human condition.Sorry, F. But he was certainly no Keats or Shelley, as one reviewer eulogizes. It was, after all, the Great Cham, Samuel Johnson, who said that "Nobody but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money"-I don't believe this is true.
Simply put, Fitzgerald was a much better short story writer than a novelist. -What this lightness of touch amounts to in his novels and stories, for the most part, is that the characters come off as two-dimensional, and when Scott tries to delve deeper for what he called "psychological moments" or whatever, the reader is left with a gracefully penned alternative two-dimensional figure. I don't even believe Johnson that "harmless drudge" as he describes himself in the dictionary he spent several unrewarded years compiling believed it either. There is a gossamer quality to Fitzgerald's prose that, it seems to me, is mistaken for lyricism. Scott acolytes, but only three stars for these pearls amidst the Period-Writing paste. But it does, anent Fitzgerald and his stories, as comprised in this book, come to mind.
I am not so much concerned here as to whether "Fitzgerald" was a "great" writer or not.
If you've never enjoyed his work before, this book won't change that. Also, to me, any Fitgerald work edited or or explained by Matthew Bruccoli is informative & interesting.The above, though, is to those who like Fitzgerald. To me, his is special beyond many other authors' writing. The use of language doesn't get much better than this. If you've never read anything by Fitzgerald, I would suggest starting with "The Great Gatsby." I smile as I read. Each sentence is a work of art and a pleasure to read. The stories themselves are so clearly placed in a post-WWI setting that they are a glimpse into life in the 1920's - as, I believe, Fitgerald wanted to show.
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