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 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.