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Tales of the Jazz Age

F. Scott Fitzgerald · short story collection, 1922 · Classics
  • The opening story defines its hero by pure idleness. Jim Powell is "a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean," a man who spends his life "conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular." Call him that in the wrong Georgia town, Fitzgerald notes, and a man might pull a rope from his hip pocket and hang you to a telegraph pole.
  • A lawyer forces a wedding deadline with a marriage license. In "The Camel's Back," Perry Parkhurst buys the license and, on a friend's advice, gives his fiancee Betty Medill an ultimatum: marry him at once or call it off forever. The Christmas season around them has already produced, by Fitzgerald's count, "forty-one dinner parties, sixteen dances, six luncheons... and thirteen bridge parties."
  • One boy's hometown is literally named Hades. John T. Unger leaves for boarding school with his father's send-off, "Don't forget who you are and where you come from... You are an Unger, from Hades," and a pocketbook stuffed with cash. Hades is the actual name of his Mississippi hometown, and he is headed toward a friend whose family owns a mountain made of a single diamond.
  • The diamond's owner tries to bribe God directly. Cornered by attacking aeroplanes, Braddock Washington offers the Almighty the greatest diamond ever cut, set in a gold dome with a radium altar, in trade for restoring things exactly "as they were yesterday at this hour." Fitzgerald notes drily that Washington "doubted only whether he had made his bribe big enough."
  • One story's newborn arrives looking seventy years old. In "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the newborn sits in his crib with sparse hair "almost white" and a "long smoke-coloured beard," then asks his horrified father, "Are you my father?... I wish you'd get me out of this place." The story runs his life backward from there, old age first.
  • The collection closes by torching its own genre. The final piece, "Jemina, the Mountain Girl," burlesques hillbilly romance until its lovers catch fire and die in each other's arms: "she was a human alcohol lamp." The family fishes the bodies out and throws them into the stream together, since "the two splashes they made were as one."
7 hrs → 50 sec

Why it earns a slot: Why it earns a slot: it shows Fitzgerald before Gatsby locked him into one register, swinging from a dice-game morality tale to a man bribing God to a self-parodying hillbilly farce, all in one book.

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The archive

Classics

Love of Life, and Other Stories

Jack London · short story collection, 1907

A prospector abandoned by his partner in the Canadian Barrens starves, crawls, and finally strangles a dying wolf with his bare hands to survive.

4 hrs → 50 sec27 Sept
Classics

Bliss, and Other Stories

Katherine Mansfield · short story collection, 1920

A woman spends one evening drowning in unnamed happiness, then watches it get named for her at her own dinner party.

5 hrs → 50 sec26 Sept
Classics

Plain Tales from the Hills

Rudyard Kipling · short story collection, 1888

Kipling's debut collection strings together forty vignettes of colonial India where a Hill girl's broken heart, a servant's dead toddler, and a dying loafer's stolen manuscript all get the same flat, devastating treatment.

6 hrs → 50 sec25 Sept
Classics

Lyrical Ballads

William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge · poetry collection, 1798

Two young poets publish anonymously, betting that a cursed sailor's ghost story and a girl who refuses to subtract her dead siblings can prove ordinary speech is enough for poetry.

2 hrs → 50 sec24 Sept
Classics

North of Boston

Robert Frost · poetry collection, 1914

A collection of New England narrative poems where neighbors, spouses, and hired hands keep talking around the one thing they actually mean.

1 hrs → 50 sec23 Sept
Classics

Poems of Passion

Ella Wheeler Wilcox · poetry collection, 1883

A wildly popular 1883 love-poem collection so scandalous that Wilcox opens the book with a five-page defense of her own work.

1 hrs → 50 sec22 Sept
Classics

New Arabian Nights

Robert Louis Stevenson · short story collection, 1882

A prince slumming incognito through London nightlife stumbles into a club that exists to arrange its members' suicides by playing cards, and Stevenson spins the premise into six interlocking tales of disguise, murder, and blind luck.

8 hrs → 50 sec21 Sept
Classics

The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales

Bret Harte · short story collection, 1870

A mining camp of gamblers and outcasts adopts a dying woman's newborn as its collective redemption, then loses everything to a flood the same year its luck peaks.

11 hrs → 50 sec20 Sept
Classics

Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman · poetry collection, 1855

A thirty-seven-year-old poet declares his own body and the reader's one substance, then spends hundreds of pages proving it by refusing to apologize for a single contradiction.

10 hrs → 50 sec19 Sept
Classics

Xingu

Edith Wharton · short story, 1916

A society book club fakes deep knowledge of something called "Xingu" to impress a visiting novelist, and an encyclopedia eventually reveals it is just a river in Brazil.

42 min → 50 sec18 Sept
Classics

The Country of the Pointed Firs

Sarah Orne Jewett · novella, 1896

A visiting writer boards with a Maine herbalist and finds a whole vanishing world of sea captains, jilted hermits, and clan reunions packed into one small fishing village.

3 hrs → 50 sec17 Sept
Classics

The Open Boat and Other Stories

Stephen Crane · short story collection, 1898

A ten-foot dinghy, a marshal's secret wedding, and an old woman swallowed by a crowd: Stephen Crane's 1898 collection turns near-misses into the whole point.

5 hrs → 50 sec16 Sept
Classics

The Troll Garden, and Selected Stories

Willa Cather · short story collection, 1905

Eleven stories of Nebraska prairie exile and East Coast hunger, Willa Cather's first collection closes with a Pittsburgh usher who steals two thousand dollars for one week of the beautiful life, then walks in front of a train rather than go back.

6 hrs → 50 sec15 Sept
Classics

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle · short story collection, 1894

Twelve cases where Holmes is right about almost everything, capped by Arthur Conan Doyle throwing him off a cliff to be done with him.

8 hrs → 50 sec14 Sept
Classics

The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories

H. G. Wells · short story collection, 1911

A sighted man falls into a hidden Andean valley certain the old proverb will crown him king, and learns an eye is worthless to people who rebuilt every sense but sight.

12 hrs → 50 sec12 Sept
Classics

The Happy Prince, and Other Tales

Oscar Wilde · short story collection, 1888

Wilde's fairy tales dress up class cruelty as bedtime stories, and in every one, real love costs the giver their life.

1 hrs → 50 sec11 Sept
Classics

The Monkey's Paw

W. W. Jacobs · short story, 1902

A sergeant hands over a cursed monkey's paw that grants three wishes, and the family's first casual wish for money comes true through their son's mangled death.

18 min → 50 sec10 Sept
Classics

Beasts and Super-Beasts

Saki (H. H. Munro) · short story collection, 1914

Saki's 1914 collection where dinner-party England keeps getting outmaneuvered, by wolves, children, and one very patient con artist.

5 hrs → 50 sec9 Sept
Classics

The Damned Thing

Ambrose Bierce · short story, 1893

A frontier inquest tries to explain a mauling death, but the surviving witness insists the killer was a color the human eye cannot register.

15 min → 50 sec8 Sept
Classics

The Piazza Tales

Herman Melville · short story collection, 1856

Six stories bound by one nerve: a scrivener who stops complying, a slave ship whose captain isn't the one in charge, and a bell-maker crushed by the machine he built to replace him.

6 hrs → 50 sec7 Sept
Classics

The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories

Kate Chopin · novella and short stories, 1899

A married woman at a Gulf Coast resort learns to swim, takes a lover, and decides she would rather drown than keep belonging to anyone.

5 hrs → 50 sec6 Sept
Classics

Mosses from an Old Manse

Nathaniel Hawthorne · short story collection, 1846

Hawthorne moves into a haunted-feeling Concord parsonage and fills it with twenty-five tales where science, faith, and craftsmanship all curdle into ruin.

12 hrs → 50 sec5 Sept
Classics

The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories

Anton Chekhov · short story collection, 1917

A married bank clerk starts a Yalta fling to kill time and ends up trapped in the first real love of his life, with no idea how to live it.

5 hrs → 50 sec4 Sept
Classics

Complete Original Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant · short story collection, 1903

The complete Maupassant story cycle opens with a prostitute saving a coach full of respectable French citizens from the Prussians, and closes with those same citizens eating in front of her while she starves and weeps.

37 hrs → 50 sec3 Sept
Classics

Whirligigs

O. Henry · short story collection, 1910

A killer on the run, a kidnapped boy who refuses to leave, and a five-dollar divorce: twenty-four O. Henry stories bound by one rule, life spins on you the moment you think you have it figured out.

6 hrs → 50 sec2 Sept
Classics

The £1,000,000 Bank-Note, and Other New Stories

Mark Twain · short story collection, 1893

A broke American is handed an uncashable million-pound note as a rich man's bet and discovers that just carrying it, never spending it, is enough to buy him an entire life.

5 hrs → 50 sec1 Sept
Classics

The Masque of the Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe · short story, 1842

A prince locks a thousand nobles inside a walled abbey to outrun a plague, and the plague walks in anyway, dressed for the party.

11 min → 50 sec31 Aug
Classics

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes · novel, 1605

A minor nobleman reads himself insane on chivalry romances, then rides out as a knight-errant to fight giants that turn out to be windmills.

32 hrs → 50 sec30 Aug
Classics

Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol · novel, 1842

A con man tours provincial Russia buying the legal identities of dead serfs off landowners who can't quite believe what they're being asked, and the scheme works because everyone around him is running a smaller version of the same fraud.

11 hrs → 50 sec29 Aug

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