So the internet is all abuzz about Baz Luhrmann’s 3D adaptation of The Great Gatsby and the film trailer for the project that just dropped.
While Gatsby is great and all, there are a LOT of other Jazz Age novels you could also check out. (Some of them are even by women!) In the video above, I give you four reading recommendations from the 1920s to sate your Jazz Age lust.
Oh dang, now I have to read all of these!
It’s interesting, trying to think of books of the era that I would recommend, because I haven’t read widely enough in the period/genre to come up with much, I think. When I pick books, I find I tend to go for the stories of the less enfranchised — with war stories, for instance, I will always, always read about ordinary soldiers and civilians caught in the middle before I’ll read about commanders and leaders of nations. I usually think of Jazz Age fiction as being about the wealthy and the glittering, and I should probably expand my understanding of that. Hooray, good books to discover!
For real-life accounts of the Jazz Age, you find a lot of amazing ones in (of course) Hard Times by Studs Terkel, which is an oral history of the Great Depression, so many of his interviewees contrast their circumstances in the ’30s with that of the decades before.
(Source: nonmodernist)
"There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery."
—
Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin
I’m reading this on @byzantienne’s enthusiastic recommendation, and so far I absolutely concur with it.
