Parties: A Literary Companion

A party is the ultimate social crucible and playground, an opportunity for the gregarious to shine, the wallflower to shrink, the arriviste to jockey for position, and the gatecrasher to finesse his unexpected arrival. Many novelists, playwrights and poets have used parties as tour de force set pieces to portray the dynamics of character, plot and social interaction; this fabulously entertaining collection gathers for the first time the best writing about this most social of rituals from such diverse sources as:

Truman Capote

the Bible

Martin Amis

Dominick Dunne

T.S. Eliot

Daphne DuMaurier

Tom Wolfe

Colette

Harold Pinter

Lord Byron

Evelyn Waugh

Horace

Dorothy Parker

Vita Sackville West

Jane Austen

Vladimir Nabokov

Oscar Wilde

James Thurber

Noel Coward

Edith Wharton

Martin Cruz Smith BR>William Shakespeare

Virginia WooIf

Muriel Spark

F. Scott Fitzgerald

John Steinbeck

and many others

By party-goers and party-givers alike, this sparkling volume will be imbibed as joyously as vintage Champagne.