Party Stories

Everyone loves a party: this beautiful hardcover gathers a glittering array of famous celebrations from throughout classic literature--from Austen, Tolstoy, and Maupassant 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 Lizzie meeting Darcy in Pride and Prejudice to J. Edgar Hoover consorting with Truman Capote in Don DeLillo’s “The Black and White Ball.”

Revelry can be revealing of character, as in Jay 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 conceal 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.” Glamour with a gothic twist makes an appearance here in the fancy dress ball at Manderley from Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” at which Death himself is a guest.

But 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,” Saki's "A Boar Pig," Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pnin Gives a Party,” and more. All sorts of literary greats consort in this festive gathering, a perfect 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.