Bits of Paradise

by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald

Scott:
"The Popular Girl" "Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar"* "Love in the Night"

Scott and Zelda:
"Our Own Movie Queen"

Zelda:
"The Original Follies Girl"
"Southern Girl" "The Girl the Prince Liked"
"The Girl with Talent" "A Millionaire's Girl"
"Poor Working Girl"

Scott:
"The Hotel Child" "A New Leaf"

Zelda:
"Miss Ella" "The Continental Angle" "A Couple of Nuts"

Scott:
"What a Handsome Pair!" "Last Kiss" "Dearly Beloved"

* = "Dice, Brassknucles & Guitar" appeared only in the Pocketbook edition of Bits of Paradise.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, American, Classic Literature

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.

Reviews

[Vitória · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I cannot deny I was rather excited to read previously unpublished short stories by Scott Fitzgerald (and some of them were unsurprisingly very good), I must say what was truly refreshing was reading more of Zelda’s work, and doing so just proved she was as fantastically talented as her husband. I suppose what kept her going even at the darkest moments of her life (and, by God, there were a few), was the fact that she “quietly expected great things to happen to her, and no doubt that’s one of the reasons why they did.”

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

"They looked fine together; they were both dusted with soft golden brown like bees' wings, and they were tall, and the color under their skins was apricot, and there was harmony in the way he leaned forward and she leaned back against the red-leather bench..." (229-230).

I spotted this in a used bookshop and, despite already having a few short story collections by Fitzgerald stowed away in Tennessee, I felt a desperate need to get this one. Why? Because it actually credits Zelda Fitzgerald for ten short stories that (gasp) she wrote, the first collection to credit her accordingly when published in the 1970s. During their career, some short stories were originally credited to F. Scott by The Post, ignoring Zelda's tangible collaboration, or were credited to both when it was purely Zelda's handiwork.

I read the Fitzgeralds for the sparkling moments of clarity, their incandescence. Romanticized descriptions that flow like honey, revelations of the ephemerality of life. Little moments of truth or challenging jibes: "Like so many Americans, he valued things rather than cared about them" (148).

This is ideal summertime reading with stories that have much to say about love, fate, money, and the ex-pat experience. A "frieze of apple blossoms"!!?! The "echolalia of chatter"?!!! Be still, my heart.

As Scottie, their child, writes in the foreword, these are best thought of "less as literature than as reports from another, more romantic world" (12).

[Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best part about this collection is that it contains two short stories that are not found in any other FSF collection—The Popular Girl, and, What a Handsome Pair—both which stand apart from the others in the collection. The nine other FSF short stories are very good as well. Collectively they cover Paris, Southern France, New York City, Hollywood, small town South, Italy, Belgium, Amsterdam, St. Paul, and North Carolina. And for the first time the eleven short stories of Zelda Fitzgerald are collected. Though there is no comparison between Scott and Zelda, any avid fan of FSF would want to have the works of Zelda as well. There was a lot of collaboration between the two. The book also contains an excellent Preface by Matthew J. Bruccoli.

[Pippa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scott is not at his best in these short stories. I enjoyed 'The Popular Girl'. Zelda is strikingly different from him... very original altogether. 'A Couple of Nuts' was desperately sad.

[Frabe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scritti negli anni '20-'30 e assemblati nel 1973, questi racconti di Francis Scott Fitzgerald e della moglie Zelda - generalmente lineari quelli di lui (tre stelle), ricchi di troppi arabeschi quelli di lei (due stelle) - concorrono a descrivere un'epoca, specie nei suoi aspetti più vivaci, attraverso le storie dei protagonisti: giovani, belli, ricchi, brillanti e... sognatori, inevitabilmente destinati ad aprire presto gli occhi.

[Mark Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bits of Paradise: 21 Uncollected Stories, published in 1973, was the first volume to collect Zelda Fitzgerald’s short stories along with several uncollected stories written by her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald. 9 of the stories are Zelda’s, 11 are Scott’s, and 1 is credited to both Scott and Zelda.

Like most short story collections, Bits of Paradise is a mixed bag. Scott’s greatest short stories had already been gathered in several posthumous collections, and Bits of Paradise was the best of what was left over. The Foreword by Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Scott and Zelda’s only child, claims “This is the last book which will ever be published devoted to previously uncollected writings of my parents.” (p.1) Scholars of both Scott and Zelda will have to stifle their laughter at that one, as there have been numerous collections of both Scott and Zelda’s writings published since 1973.

The stories in Bits of Paradise are presented in chronological order. “The Popular Girl,” published in two parts in The Saturday Evening Post in 1922, is a fine story with some of Fitzgerald’s most vivid descriptions of Saint Paul, his hometown. It’s curious to me that Fitzgerald didn’t include “The Popular Girl” in his 1922 short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age, as it’s much stronger than the weakest stories in that volume. (“Tarquin of Cheapside,” “Mr. Icky” and “Jemina,” I’m looking at you!) Fitzgerald did not share my opinion and considered “The Popular Girl” “too cheap to print.” (Dear Scott, Dear Max, p.54) Like many of his short stories, “The Popular Girl” shows Fitzgerald’s fascinations with young love and class.

“The Popular Girl” tells the tale of Yanci Bowman, a girl who wants to marry a rich man in order to secure her financial future. The story may seem cheesy and melodramatic to readers now, 100 years after its first publication, but it is at the same time a realistic picture of the limited choices a woman like Yanci had to make about her future in 1922.

The description of Saint Paul occurs as Yanci takes Scott for a moonlight drive down “Crest Avenue,” patterned after Summit Avenue, a street that Fitzgerald lived on, and nearby, for much of his youth. “Crest Avenue” also appears in Fitzgerald’s play The Vegetable, and in the Basil Duke Lee short story “Forging Ahead.” Fitzgerald critiques the architecture of Summit Avenue, such as “the great brownstone mass built by R.R. Comerford, the flour king, followed by a half mile of pretentious stone houses put up in the gloomy 90’s.” (p.29) The Comerford house is meant to be the James J. Hill house, a massive mansion built in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, which was greatly in vogue in the 1880’s and 1890’s, but was decidedly out of fashion by the time Fitzgerald was writing the story in 1921. Yanci and Scott drive until Crest dead-ends at the Mississippi River. “This is our show street,” she says to him. Scott responds, “A museum of American architectural failures.” (p.30) That quote still gets attributed to Scott Fitzgerald, although it’s rarely mentioned as coming from “The Popular Girl,” and it oddly gets mangled to “a mausoleum of American architectural monstrosities.” The quote is certainly emblematic of what a snobbish Easterner like Scott Kimberley might have thought of Saint Paul in 1921.

Fitzgerald was always concerned with the passage of time, and the impermanence of life. As Yanci sits on a train, Fitzgerald narrates, “Here and there sat a chaperone, a mass of decaying rock in a field of flowers, predicting with a mute and somber fatality the end of all gayety and all youth.” (p.54) That quote is so beautifully emblematic of Fitzgerald to me: even in the midst of happiness he focuses instead on something sad and somber.

“Our Own Movie Queen” was originally published as by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but according to his notes, it was “Two-thirds by Zelda. Only my climax and revision.” (p.86) It appears in Bits of Paradise as by Scott and Zelda. “Our Own Movie Queen” is another short story set in Scott’s home state of Minnesota—this time in the fictional town of New Heidelberg.

I found “The Dance” to be a fascinating story. It’s perhaps not that successful, but it’s interesting nonetheless. It’s told in the first person, from the viewpoint of a female narrator, it takes place in the South, and there’s a little bit about race. And “The Dance” features a beautiful closing sentence: “What I dread above all things is the unknown depths, the incalculable ebb and flow, the secret shapes of things that drift through opaque darkness under the surface of the sea.” (p.157)

“Jacob’s Ladder” belongs to what I would call the “Lois Moran story cluster,” a group of stories concerning older male protagonists and younger female love interests. Lois Moran was an 18-year-old actress when the 31-year-old Fitzgerald met her on his trip to Hollywood in 1927. Fitzgerald quickly became besotted with Moran and based several characters on her, including Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night. Did anything physical ever happen between Moran and Fitzgerald? Depends on who you ask, old sport. Whether or not their relationship was ever consummated, it provided Fitzgerald with the material for some fine short stories.

In one of his sharpest lines critiquing America and capitalism, Fitzgerald writes bitingly of Jacob: “Like so many Americans, he valued things rather than cared about them.” (p.162)

“The Swimmers” is another one of the “Lois Moran cluster” stories, and it also fits into the “marriage problems cluster,” a group of stories, largely written in 1929 and 1930, that give the reader the distinct impression all was not well in the Fitzgerald household.

There are plenty of beautiful sentences in “The Swimmers,” and one of my favorites is about the young woman who entrances the main character: “Looking for a last time into her eyes, full of cool secrets, he realized how much he was going to miss these mornings, without knowing whether it was the girl who interested him or what she represented of his ever-new, ever-changing country.” (p.195)

The last paragraph of “The Swimmers” ranks with the best of Fitzgerald’s writing. “France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter—it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.” (p.210)

After “The Swimmers” we get 6 stories in a row from Zelda. The “girl” series of stories mostly appeared in the magazine College Humor, which was not as lowbrow as it sounds. College Humor had made Scott an offer of $10,000 to serialize The Great Gatsby in 1925. Thankfully, Fitzgerald turned them down, writing to his literary agent Harold Ober, “most people who saw it advertised in College Humor would be sure that Gatsby was a great halfback.” (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.74)

The “girl” stories were written by Zelda, and Scott assisted with the editing, but they appeared in College Humor as written by both Scott and Zelda. Harold Ober wrote a memo about the “girl” stories on February 14, 1929. “Scott Fitzgerald said that Zelda would do six articles for College Humor, that he would go over them and fix them up and that the articles would be signed with both their names.” (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.127) We don’t know what Zelda thought of this co-billing arrangement.

Adding to the confusion about authorship and billing, Zelda’s story “A Millionaire’s Girl” appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in May of 1930 under Scott’s name alone. How did the authorship change come about? It was partly Harold Ober’s fault. Ober wrote a memo about the story: “I think it was meant for College Humor but came from France with Scott’s handwritten changes and I thought it was his and sent it to SEP {The Saturday Evening Post} and they bought it.” (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.166) Ober makes it sound as though it was just an honest mistake, and it is conceivable that he thought Scott wrote it, as it’s the most “Scott-like” of the “girl” series of stories. But “A Millionaire’s Girl” was also the fifth story in the “girl” series, and the general pattern of the story fits with the previous stories, so didn’t that tip off Ober that it was part of the series for College Humor? And the confusion also begs the question, didn’t Scott send the story with a cover letter, or anything indicating who wrote the story? Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t, we don’t know.

In a letter to Scott, dated April 8, 1930, Ober wrote: “I note what you say about Zelda’s story that I sold to the Post. It is much too good a story for College Humor and it had so much of you in it that I am sure it would have been recognized as your story no matter under what name it was published…I think it is a great mistake to waste good ideas on Swanson {the editor of College Humor} for such a low price. I really felt a little guilty about dropping Zelda’s name from that story, but I think she understands that using the two names would have tied the story up with the College Humor stories and might have got us into trouble. Will you please tell her for me that it was a mighty good piece of work.” (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.166)

The difference in money that Ober refers to was large: College Humor paid $500 for most of the “girl” stories, eventually raised to $800 for the final story in the series, while The Saturday Evening Post paid $4,000 for “A Millionaire’s Girl.” Unfortunately, we don’t know what Scott said to Ober about the story, since that letter is not included in the book of Fitzgerald-Ober correspondence.

There’s more to the story, but we must go to another source for the information. Nancy Milford’s 1970 biography Zelda tells us that there was a telegram, presumably sent by Ober, (although Milford doesn’t say who the telegram is from) telling Scott “Millionaire’s Girl can sell Post four thousand without Zelda’s name cable confirmation.” (Zelda: A Biography, by Nancy Milford, p.398) Scott must have cabled back yes to Ober, allowing him to sell the story to the Post without Zelda’s name attached as the author.

I suspect Ober thought “A Millionaire’s Girl” was too good for College Humor, so he submitted it to The Saturday Evening Post, which was the prime market for Scott’s short stories. We don’t know how Ober presented the story to the Post: did he say it was written by Scott and Zelda, or did he present it as by Scott alone? Either way, Ober was going behind Scott’s back, as the story should have been offered to College Humor first. We don’t have Scott’s telegram responding to Ober about selling the story to the Post, all we know is that he obviously said yes, knowing that Zelda’s name would be off the story.

I doubt there was conscious malicious intent on either Ober or Scott’s part to strip Zelda of the authorship credit for “A Millionaire’s Girl,” but the incident doesn’t reflect well on either one of them. We don’t know if Zelda was consulted about any of this, and we don’t know how she reacted. I would assume she was not happy about the incident.

In a letter dated May 26, 1930, shortly after the Post publication of “A Millionaire’s Girl,” Ober wrote to Fitzgerald that H.N. Swanson, the editor of College Humor, had sent a telegram to both Ober and Fitzgerald. The telegram is presumably lost to history, but from what Ober writes to Fitzgerald, it seems as though Swanson was annoyed that “A Millionaire’s Girl” had been published in The Saturday Evening Post and not offered to College Humor first. Swanson had every right to be annoyed about this. Ober advised Scott not to answer, and gave his own opinion of Swanson:

“I think Swanson is slightly crazy. He seems to be possessed with the idea that for some unknown reason he should get the best work of the best authors for a fraction of the price other magazines are willing to pay…I am pretty much disgusted with him…I don’t think his magazine has any great dignity and I’ll be just as pleased if your name never again appeared in it.” (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.171)

This letter plainly shows Ober’s attitude towards College Humor and reinforces his motivation for submitting “A Millionaire’s Girl” to the Post. The higher price Scott’s short stories fetched, the higher Ober’s commission as an agent would be. Ober also knew that the story would have much high visibility if it was published in the Post rather than College Humor. I’m not trying to justify Ober’s actions, but I think money played a role, as well as his general dislike of Swanson and College Humor.

Much of the discussion of Scott and Zelda’s relationship unfortunately turns into a competition of Scott vs. Zelda, or Zelda vs. Scott. As author Mary Gordon wrote in her 1991 introduction to The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, “Why do we feel as if we can belong to only one of two armed camps, the camp that sees her as a formless, scattershot nothing who made a great writer’s last days miserable with her pretensions and demands, or the camp that is sure she wrote his best work, and blames him for her disintegration.” (p.xviii) I agree. Too often, discussions of Scott and Zelda’s marriage turns into a competition of “who was worse to whom,” which does neither side any favors. Isn’t it enough to say that they were both awful to each other, yet they both loved each other in some deep, unexplainable way?

“A Millionaire’s Girl” is perhaps the finest story of the “girl” series, and features terrific observations, such as this: “I could see her changing personalities behind the first onrush of people in the Los Angeles station, marking herself with the silent wary confidence so necessary in a world of competitive struggle.” (Bits of Paradise, p.259) “A Millionaire’s Girl” really is an excellent story, and it’s close enough to Scott’s work to masquerade as it, but Zelda’s odd metaphors and similes mark it clearly as her own work.

Because readers who encountered “A Millionaire’s Girl” in 1930 thought it was a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and readers in 2022 know it’s a story by Zelda Fitzgerald, I was struck as I read the story by this odd sensation of switching the gender of the narrator between male and female. (We never learn the gender of the narrators of the “girl” stories.)

Zelda was a talented writer with a gift for description and narration, but I think Nancy Milford accurately diagnoses the shortcomings of the “girl” stories. “They do not quite succeed in coming to life. Seen always from a distance by a detached and omniscient narrator about whom we know nothing (we are not even sure whether that observer is male or female), the girls do not interact with life. Rather, they are moved through it. Dialogue is almost nonexistent…what she does is to describe the characters, not develop them.” (Zelda: A Biography, by Nancy Milford, p.151)

I found two of Zelda’s later stories, “Miss Ella,” and “A Couple of Nuts” to be more successful than the “girl” stories. Zelda’s voice seems more developed in these stories, there’s more a sense of her individual style as a writer.

It’s not quite fair to come up with a final judgement on Zelda’s writings based on the short stories in Bits of Paradise. Zelda suffered mental breakdowns in 1930, 1932, and 1934, and she published no stories or articles after 1934. (Although she was able to write a novel, Save Me the Waltz, in just a couple of months while she was in the hospital in 1932.) it’s impossible to know in what direction her writing talents might have developed. If we were to judge Scott on his first 10 short stories, there’s no way anyone could have predicted that he would turn out so many masterpieces in the future. But Zelda showed a clear talent for writing.

“A New Leaf” finds Scott exploring alcoholic dissipation in a manner that carried over into his novel Tender Is the Night. There’s a beautiful sentence at the beginning of the story: “Anything added to beauty has to be paid for—that is to say, the qualities that pass as substitutes can be liabilities when added to beauty itself.” (p.299-300)

“What a Handsome Pair!” isn’t Fitzgerald’s best story, but there are magnificent sentences. Consider this description in the second paragraph: “Her eyes were red from weeping, but she was young enough for it not to detract from her glossy beauty—a beauty that had reached the point where it seemed to contain in itself the secret of its own growth, as if it would go on increasing forever.” (p.340) There’s nothing quite like Fitzgerald when he’s writing about a pretty girl—they obviously moved him to new heights of expression.

I can’t help but wonder if parts of “What a Handsome Pair!” were inspired by Scott and Zelda’s marriage. “He hated the conflict that had grown out of their wanting the same excellences, the same prizes from life.” (p.358) There was certainly conflict between Scott and Zelda during the time this story was written in 1932, and Scott was worried that Zelda’s writings would cover the same subject matter as the long-gestating novel he was working on. In “What a Handsome Pair!” there is a composer whose wife knows nothing about music, and I wonder if this was a mean-spirited jab at Zelda’s attempts to be a writer.

Bits of Paradise finishes with two pieces of Scott’s that were published posthumously. “Last Kiss” appeared in Collier’s magazine in 1949, 9 years after Scott’s death. At the very end of “Last Kiss,” we get a nod towards Fitzgerald’s most famous work, as the main character seeks to repeat the past, just like Jay Gatsby.

“Dearly Beloved” is an odd little sketch. Just over two pages in length, it was unpublished until 1969. It’s Fitzgerald’s only story featuring main characters who are Black. Fitzgerald’s short stories changed after Zelda’s breakdowns. Scott lost some of that golden, romantic charm of youth, some of the optimism that fueled him, that tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…and it was replaced by a knowledge that life could be harsh and cruel. He writes in “Dearly Beloved,” “For things change and get so different that we can hardly recognize them and it seems that only our names remain the same.” (p.386) “Dearly Beloved” ends with Fitzgerald stating, “So things go,” a phrase that oddly enough brings to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s repeated refrain of “So it goes,” from Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, the same year that “Dearly Beloved” first appeared. And so, Fitzgerald continues to echo and rhyme down the generations, his beautiful, evocative prose still reverberating.

[Anna Bosman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Welcome to the Platonic world of movie scripts, where boneless happy endings are firmly supported by the elegant, art deco frameworks wielded of the finest anglo-american linguistic alloys! Boy, they surely did know how to build sky scrapers out of thin air in New York in the beginning of the past century. My provincial mind is officially blown.

But how delighfully dated! Scott's jealous arrows aimed at the English, the Russian, and the French, teamed with his very well-dressed American pride, self-aware enough to be graceful rather than pompous, generous rather than entitled. The brave new world on the brink of getting garish, subtle irony, self-parody, everlasting pinch of salt, ever-bursting soap bubbles. The fragility of it all is killing me.

And the beautiful juxtaposition of the two - Zelda vs Scott - were they rivals? Definitely. There is even a bitter little short story about just that, sweet but heartbroken. Some say Zelda was a copy cat, I beg to differ: her telescope aimed at entirely different things. She, in her abstracted womanly fashion, preferred the details and the frills - of the psychological and the existential rather than the lacy sort, of course. She was, as a matter of fact, a lot less likely to make her subjects live long and prosper beyond all sense and logic. She was less desperate to be happy - perhaps she never knew what happiness feels like? Some say she was a nutcase, but out of these two she seems less delusional - ever so slightly.

I can't help but fall in love with the jazz era over, and over, and over again - its sugar-sweet tendency to over-romanticise all things bland and trivial and turn every tree into a Christmas tree somehow coincides with the way I live my own 21-century lot. There is always beauty to be found and a story to be told, and a happy ending to be expected - no matter how unlikely.

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mlle Alice, pouvez-vous nous raconter votre rencontre avec Fragments du Paradis?


"Lorsque je me suis lancée dans la lecture de "Tendre est la Nuit" de F.S. Fitzgerald, dans ma superbe édition de Christian Lacroix, j'ai eu la désagréable surprise de découvrir un défaut dans le livre que m'empêchait de continuer ma lecture. Heureusement, à peine l'incident fut signalé au Livre de Poche qu'ils me renvoyaient un expemplaire parfait avec en cadeau "Les Fragments du Paradis"!"

Dites-nous en un peu plus sur son histoire...


"Fragments du Paradis" est un recueil de nouvelles présentées par la fille de Francis Scott Fitzgerald."

Mais que s'est-il exactement passé entre vous?


"Je ne dirais pas qu'avec ce livre je me suis mise à aimer les nouvelles, il ne faut tout de même pas exagérer, mais j'ai lu celles-ci avec plaisir en tous cas. Je retrouve la plume que j'ai apprécié dans "Tendre est la Nuit" tout en découvrant que F.S. Fitzgerald c'est aussi écrire des histoires peut-être pas tout à fait gaies mais qui finissent bien en tous cas! Je garde une petite préférence pour la toute première nouvelle "Une Jeune Fille Très Populaire" et pour la petite histoire policière intitulée "La Danse". Mais elles se valent à peu près toutes. A vrai dire, on retrouve à chaque fois la même ambiance, le même monde, les mêmes villes et presque les mêmes personnages. On finit par avoir l'impression de les avoir nous-même cotoyés!"

Et comment cela s'est-il fini?


"Cela ne fait que confirmer mon opinion de F.S. Fitzgerald, l'améliore, même, et mon envie de lire au plus vite "Gatsby le Magnifique!"


http://booksaremywonderland.hautetfor...

[carl theaker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This volume contains stories by Scott, a pair of them posthumously,
stories by Zelda, and one story by both of them. Published in '73 as
'uncollected', one wonders if they've since been collected somewhere else.

This uncollected collection has a sentimental touch for me as it's my
first batch of FSF's stories given to me by a loved one. The jacket
cover with the Fitzgerald family photos on the back is a bit yellowed,
but the pages are still fresh, I could read them all again.

[Gayle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found this book a bit intriguing. I loved the stories by F Scott, but the stories by Zelda I felt were too "overdone". She seems pre-occupied with descriptive prose, to the extent where I lost the plot at times. The descriptions were too long-winded by Zelda; I much preferred Scott's writing. Personal choice I guess.

[Vincent Konrad · Rating 3 out of 5]

A real mixed bag. Some of them are just tediously sentimental, but there are a couple of bangers as well.

Zelda’s stories easily equal Scott’s in this collection, and one wonders how much better still she could have been under less stifling circumstances.

[Sami · Rating 4 out of 5]

* The Popular Girl - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
* Love in the Night - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Beautiful descriptions of the French Rivera.
* Our Own Movie Queen - ⭐️⭐️
* A Penny Spent - ⭐️⭐️
* The Dancer - ⭐️
It included an unnecessary racist conversation that feels completely out of place and played no part with the rest of the story plot. In the end distracting from the actual story and leaving an unpleasant feeling.
* Jacob’s Ladder - ⭐️⭐️
Wolf in sheep’s clothing.
* The Swimmers - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The boat scene was brilliant.
* The Original Follies Girl - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Zelda’s descriptions of women are so modern they could have been written today - “She was very kaleidoscopic. There were times when she’d just sit and drink and drink, ending the evening with a heavy British accent, and then there were other times when she’d drink nothing but would eat great trays of asparagus hollandaise.”
“She wore herself out with the struggle between her desire for physical perfection and her desire to use it.”
* The Southern Girl - ⭐️
* The Girl the Prince Liked - ⭐️⭐️
“She was rose-gold.”
* The Girl with Talent - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
“There was once’, i began, ‘a house of such wonderful shining glass that is was almost a diamond -.” I feel that hyphen was hinting towards ‘as big as the ritz.’
* A Millionaires Girl - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“I somehow think you can’t go on forever protecting quarrels, and that romance born in violence and suspicion will end themselves on the same note.”
* Poor Working Girl - ⭐️⭐️
* The Hotel Child - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
* A New Leaf - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
* Miss Ella - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
* The Continental Angle - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Like eavesdropping to a conversation at a reasonable.
* A Couple of Nuts - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The most beautifully descriptive sentence - “the nights lifted themselves exhausted from the pavements; restless midnights settled over the city like the fall of a cooling soufflé in the bowl of early morning.”
* What a Handsome Pair - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A couples rivalry to match Scott and Zelda’s.
* Last Kiss - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
* Dearly Beloved - ⭐️⭐️

[Heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had so much fun reading this book. The stories covers Paris, Southern France, New York City, Hollywood, the South, Italy, Belgium, Amsterdam, St. Paul, and North Carolina. And for the first time the eleven short stories of Zelda Fitzgerald are collected. But in my opinion there is no comparison between Scott and Zelda. I read the Fitzgeralds for the sparkling moments of clarity, their incandescence. Romanticised descriptions that flow like honey, revelations of the ephemerality of life. Little moments of truth or challenging jibes: "Like so many Americans, he valued things rather than cared about them"
This is such ideal reading with stories that have much to say about love, fate, money, and the ex-pat experience, and people just having fun.

[Nathaniel Wintraub · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love the decadent imagery of cosmopolitan life! Zelda’s ability to paint a scene is unparalleled by Scott, but Scott’s witty, plot-driven short stories also keep the pages turning. Really enjoyed :)

[Javiera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Algunos de los cuentos son muy buenos. Es un libro agradable de leer

[Ann Piccirillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great first-person account of Scott & Zelda's daughter.

[Chloe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellence.

[Tawanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Zelda's stories made me want to do house chores

[Jakub Kolčář · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad.

[E.J. Cullen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Geesh! And even some "nuggets" from Zelda.

[Aimee Gilbert · Rating 2 out of 5]

I

[Aaron Gallardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cinco estrellas para las maravillosas historias de Fitzgerald. Las de Zelda me resultaron muy... impermeables. Supongo que en otro estado mental las releeré.