Tales of the Jazz Age [Hardcover]

'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' sees a baby born in 1860 begin life as an old man and then age backwards. F. Scott Fitzgerald hinted at this kind of inversion when he called his era 'a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken'. Perhaps nowhere in American fiction has this 'Lost Generation' been more vividly preserved than in Fitzgerald's short fiction. Spanning the early twentieth-century American landscape, this collection captures, with Fitzgerald's signature blend of enchantment and disillusionment, America during the Jazz Age.F. Scott Fitzgerald(1896-1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University, leaving in 1917 to join the army. His body of work includes five novels-includingThe Great GatsbyandTender Is the Night-and several volumes of short stories and autobiographical pieces.
Coralie Bickford-Smithis an award-winning designer at Penguin Books (U.K.), where she has created several highly acclaimed series designs. She studied typography at Reading University and lives in London.THE JELLY-BEAN

Jim Powell was a Jelly-bean. Much as I desire to make him an appealing character, I feel that it would be unscrupulous to deceive you on that point. He was a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean and he grew lazily all during Jelly-bean season, which is every season, down in the land of the Jelly-beans well below the Mason-Dixon line.

Now if you call a Memphis man a Jelly-bean he will quite possibly pull a long sinewy rope from his hip pocket and hang you to a convenient telegraph-pole. If you call a New Orleans man a Jelly-bean he will probably grin and ask you who is taking your girl to the Mardi Gras ball. The particular Jelly-bean patch which produced the protagonist of this history lies somewhere between the two--a little city of forty thousand that has dozed sleepily for forty thousand years in solCM