Are You Ready To Swing The Night Away?

The Jazz Age comes to the Artisphere on Saturday, Sept. 28, when the Friends of the Library present the “Great Gatsby” themed Eight-Thirteen Ball.

Tickets are still available, so get yours and then get in a swinging 1920s mood with these great books:

 

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
by Therese Anne Fowler

A tale inspired by the marriage of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The novel follows their union in defiance of her father’s opposition, and her abandonment of the provincial finery of her upbringing in favor of a scandalous flapper identity that gains her entry into the literary party scenes of New York, Paris and the French Riviera.

 

 

The 1920s: A Cultural History of the United States
by Erica Hanson

Discusses the political, economic, and cultural life of the United States in the 1920s, including prohibition, the higher standard of living, the Teapot Dome scandal, barnstorming, and flappers.

 

 

Prohibition in Washington D.C.: How Dry We Weren’t
by Eight-Thirteen Ball Emcee Garrett Peck

In 1929, it was estimated that bootleggers brought twenty-two thousand gallons of whiskey, moonshine and other spirits into Washington, D.C.’s three thousand speakeasies each week. Explore an underground city ruled not by organized crime but by amateur bootleggers, where publicly teetotaling congressmen could get a stiff drink behind House office doors and the African American community of U Street was humming with a new sound called jazz.

 

 

Ella’s Big Chance: A Jazz-Age Cinderella
by Shirley Hughes

In this version of the Cinderella tale set in the 1920s, Ella has two men courting her–the handsome Duke of Arc and Buttons the delivery boy.

 

 

Fashions of a Decade: the 1920s
by Jacqueline Herald with original illustrations by Robert Price

Surveys the fads, fashions, trends, and cultural and intellectual preoccupations of the comfortable, high-living 1920s.

 

 

 

Vixen
by Jillian Larkin

In 1923 Chicago, seventeen-year-old Gloria Carmody rebels against her upcoming society wedding by visiting a speakeasy, while her Pennsylvania cousin, Clara, hides similar tastes and her best friend, Lorraine, makes plans of her own.

 

 

The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s
by Paula S. Fass

A fascinating look at white, middle-class collegiate life in the 1920s, focusing on social, cultural and sexual transitions from the post Victorian era and into the Plastic Age.

 

 

 

The Diviners
by Libba Bray

Seventeen-year-old Evie O’Neill is thrilled when she is exiled from small-town Ohio to New York City in 1926, even when a rash of occult-based murders thrusts Evie and her uncle, curator of The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult, into the thick of the investigation.

 

 

Grand Hotels of the Jazz Age: The Architecture of Schultze & Weaver
by Marianne Lamonaca and Jonathan Mogul, editors

The Breakers, the Waldorf, the Biltmore, the Sherry, the Pierrethese: all landmark hotels synonymous with grand luxury and style. Built in the 1920s by architectural firm Schultze & Weaver, their refined elegance and grandeur set the bar for hotels and resorts the world over.

 

 

Florence Harding: The First Lady, the Jazz Age, and the Death of America’s Most Scandalous President
by Carl Sferrazza Anthony

Detailed, three-dimensional portrait of the first truly modern First Lady: an equal partner in and the undisputed manager of her husband’s career, and a trusted advisor whose opinions were always consulted. Her early life included a child conceived out of wedlock and an alcoholic first husband, but in public Florence always possessed the dignified, commanding presence that won her the nickname “Duchess.”

 

Hollywood: A Novel of America in the 1920s
by Gore Vidal

Re-creates the last days of Woodrow Wilson through the turbulent Harding years when Hollywood first set out to re-create America and America set out to re-create the world.

 

 

 

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
by Deborah Blum

Between 1918 and the mid-1930s, pioneering forensic chemists chief medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler investigated poisoning cases that would have previously been unsolvable: a family mysteriously stricken bald, Barnum and Bailey’s Famous Blue Man, factory workers with crumbling bones, a diner serving poisoned pies, and many others mysterious cases.