Description

A sparkling collection of ‘flapper fiction’: stories featuring the iconic women who defined the Jazz Age

Vivacious, charming, irreverent, the flapper is a girl who knows how to have a roaring good time. In this collection of short stories, she’s a partygoer, a socialite, a student, a shopgirl, and an acrobat. She bobs her hair, shortens her skirt, searches for a husband and scandalises her mother. She’s a glittering object of delight, and a woman embracing a newfound independence.

Bringing together stories from widely adored writers and rediscovered gems, principally sourced from the magazines of the period, this collection is a celebration of the outrageous charm of an iconic figure of the Jazz Age.

Featuring works from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Dana Ames, Rudolph Fisher, John Watts, Dorothy Parker, Katherine Bush, Gertrude Schalk, Dawn Powell, Vina Delmar, Guy Gilpatric, Anita Loos and Zora Neale Hurston.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

David M. Earle is a Professor of Modernism and Print Culture at the University of West Florida. He publishes regularly on the history of magazines and popular publishing. His books include All Man! (Kent State University Press), a study of gender in 1950s men’s magazines, and Re-Covering Modernism (Routledge 2009), on the popular forms of modernist literature. He has also edited the Oxford online bibliography ‘Early 20th-Century Popular American Magazines’ (2021).

‘I believe in the flapper as an artist in her particular field, the art of being – being young, being lovely’ Zelda Fitzgerald

‘WhereAll Good Flappers Go … deftly reconsiders the relationship of modernist to modernism, and demonstrates how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s and others’ work is a part of a wider modernist impulse… The stories provide a compelling overview of the ways in which the flapper figure evolved in the popular Black and white press.’ Michelle E. Moore

‘Some stories are hilarious. Some are thoughtful. Some are sad … They can be wonderful little bon-bons … most are chef’s kisses.’Dear Author

Publisher Review

Where All Good Flappers Go … deftly reconsiders the relationship of modernist to modernism, and demonstrates how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s and others’ work is a part of a wider modernist impulse…

The stories provide a compelling overview of the ways in which the flapper figure evolved in the popular Black and white press … ultimately creating the new genre of flapper literature.

The main strength of this collection is in the breadth of authors represented: so-called literary and pulp, well-known and unknown. [They] destroy the old shibboleths of the flapper as a white girl, and they break the walls between the New Negro Renaissance, white modernism, and popular magazine and newspaper culture. — Michelle E Moore ‘An engaging collection’

‘One of the volume’s most important contributions is including African-American writers as well as stories centring working-class characters, thus revising the reductive identification of the flapper with the white middle-class.’ — Kimberly Chabot Davis ‘Some stories are hilarious. Some are thoughtful. Some are sad … They can be wonderful little bon-bons … most are chef’s kisses.’ * Dear Author * ‘Lovely, funny, human stories’ — Eric Lee