The flapper girl is an icon of the Roaring Twenties, appearing in plenty of novels and films of the era. In this anthology, Pushkin Press brings together some contemporary short stories about the flapper which were published in magazines and papers of the time that celebrated these young women as a mirror of the times.
I haven’t read much literature from the 1920s beyond the obligatory The Great Gatsby, but I’ve always found it intriguing how quickly social mores seemed to swing round during this time, and it was exciting to see how flappers were seen at the time. The editor made a point of pulling stories from both Black and white authors, as well stories both highbrow and low, giving us a nice cross-section of flapper literature to sample.
Of this collection, I’d only read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” before. It still remains among the standouts for me, but I also really enjoyed “Common Meter” by Rudolph Fisher (about a jazz band competition between rival conductors), “Night Club” by Katharine Brush (about a restroom attendant at a fashionable club), and “Monkey Junk” by Zora Neale Hurston (a hilarious tale of divorce in the style of the Bible).
I did find, interestingly, that some of the duller inclusions came from the pens of authors I’d heard of before, like Anita Loos and Dorothy Parker, and wondered if their short stories were included more for the name recognition (they were after all leading American writers during this period – but in other forms of writing!) than for the merits of the actual stories.
Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.