Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

"The Montana sunset lay between two mountains like a gigantic bruise from which dark arteries spread themselves over a poisoned sky. An immense distance under the sky crouched the village of Fish, minute, dismal, and forgotten." (from the story "The Diamond As Big As the Ritz")

Tales of the Jazz Age was F. Scott Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, published in the same year as his sophomore novel The Beautiful and the Damned and three years before his masterpiece The Great Gatsby. The collection is divided into three parts: My Last Flappers, Fantasies, and Unclassified Masterpieces. The stories are, for the most part, comedic in tone but several take on distinctly dark overtones, such as the stories May Day, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and The Lees of Happiness. That final story, which centers on a young wife whose life comes to revolve around her ailing husband, feels particularly poignant given what would become of Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, though of course the story predates Zelda's troubles by several years. It is the saddest and arguably most compelling of all the stories, a heartbreaking tale of devotion, friendship, and loss.

The best of the stories are The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, a darkly comedic thriller which centers on a young man who finds himself in the unenviable position of having to escape the compound of a man whose property rests atop a mountain made of diamond and who never lets guests leave alive lest they reveal his treasure to the world; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a vastly different tale in Fitzgerald's telling than as told by the film of the same name; The Lees of Happiness; and The Camel's Back, a ridiculous story about a man who gets dumped, gets drunk, goes to a costume party as a camel (paying a cabbie to be the other half of the costume), and accidentally marries his ex-girlfriend in what is supposed to be a mock ceremony between "the camel" and "the Egyptian snake charmer." This story is a lot funnier than it has any right to be and gets funnier with each development of the plot.

Not all of the stories are successful. May Day, which involves several characters and plot threads which cross over the course of a day (or so), is a bit unfocused, while Porcelain and Pink, Tarquin of Cheapside and Mr. Icky are all a bit thin, though not without their moments of beauty. Fortunately, even when the stories themselves are somewhat lacking in the plot, Fitzgerald's prose makes them worth the read. The elegant precision of his writing is always a treat and though few of the stories take on the grandeur of his more celebrated novels, they are beautifully written and terrifically engaging pieces of work.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (2009)

"Henry looked at the paper in Keiko's hand. The bold type screamed INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY. It was all about Japanese families being forced to evacuate... Keiko touched her heart with her finger and pointed to Henry. He touched his and felt the button his family wore. "I am Chinese."

Jamie Ford's Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet centers on Henry and the love affair that begins in 1942, when he's twelve. The object of his affections is Keiko, a girl of Japanese descent with whom he forms a quick and intense bond as the only two students of color at an all-white school. At school their friendship is inevitable, as they are isolated and bullied by the rest of their peers; however, at home, the friendship is forbidden by Henry's father, a Chinese immigrant with a deep hatred for the Japanese. When Keiko and her family are taken away to an internment camp, Henry moves heaven and earth in order to remain in contact with her but, inevitably, they loose touch. A lifetime later, now a widower with a grown son, Henry learns that the possessions belonging to several Japanese families from the war years have been unearthed in the long closed Panama Hotel. On a hunch, he investigates further, looking for something that will reignite that long severed connection.

On the face of it, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is a love story, but more than that it's a story very much concerned with issues of identity. Henry is American by birth and encouraged by his parents to be a "real" American (they go so far as to forbid him from speaking Cantonese at home so that he'll be forced to "learn his American"), even as they force him to wear a button that reads, "I Am Chinese". To his white classmates he's a foreigner and indistinguishable from the Japanese, to the other Chinese kids in his neighborhood he's a "white devil" because he goes to the white school. The only people to whom he relates in any meaningful way are Keiko and Sheldon, a black jazz musician and friend. His sense of self is in constant flux and he spends his entire life trying to balance the cultural expectations of his parents with his own desires. He cannot be his father's son and love a Japanese girl, but he cannot be whole while denying the part of himself that does love a Japanese girl. The push-pull within Henry is never really resolved (it wouldn't be realistic if it was), but it remains compelling throughout.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet isn't a flawless novel - the plot developments aren't always quite as graceful or subtle as they might be - but it's a novel that is very emotionally resonant. Ford's strength lies in the way he develops and explores the characters. Henry, Keiko, and those who surround them, are well-drawn and their relationships complex, giving the story a weight worthy of its subject matter.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2010)

“They were gone for a very long time. When they returned, Troy had been abandoned, its moss-stained walls as worn as mountain-sides, the rusting hulks of war machines decaying on its parapets amid the tatterdemalion shells of factories. The levels of the Greek palace had multiplied, gone deeper – now it resembled a vast inverted castle, its battlements and towers soaring into the depths of the earth.” (from the chapter “Agamemnon and the Word”)

In his ingenious and exquisitely written debut novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Zachery Mason takes the characters and legends well-known from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and looks at them from a variety of different perspectives. The premise of the novel involves the discovery of a series of fragments, each presenting an alternate account of the characters and stories connected to Odysseus. Here we have multiple versions of Odysseus’ homecoming, of his adventures and the figures he encountered, even a variety of characterizations of Odysseus himself. In some stories he is the Odysseus that we have always known, cunning and brave and blessed by Athena; in others he is cowardly and will do anything to avoid fighting. In one story (told from the perspective of Polyphemus) he is a pirate who maliciously mutilates an inhospitable hermit. These portrayals play on aspects of Odysseus’ personality that have always been present and taken together they give us a full and very complex picture of one of mythology’s most celebrated heroes.

Odysseus is not the centre of every fragment and in some he does not figure directly. One story, for example, recounts the myth of Theseus and ends with an abandoned and betrayed Ariadne transforming into Calypso. Another explains the Iliad and Odyssey as elaborate chess manuals, and one reimagines the odyssey as belonging to Alexander the Great, who longs to emulate Achilles but finds that he has more in common with Odysseus.

Each story is beautifully written, full of striking imagery and wit. The stories are told in very precise fashion but are self-contained so that the novel can be opened to any chapter and enjoyed. Prior to the novel’s publication it would have been easy to argue that there was absolutely no need for more Odyssey inspired stories, but The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a terrific addition to the mythological canon.