May Day

Description

Although F. Scott Fitzgerald is known for the kind of subtle, polished social commentary found in his masterpiece The Great Gatsby, his little-known novella May Day is unique in that it is the most raw, direct political commentary he ever wrote. It is a tale of the brutalities of the American class system - of privileged college boys, soldiers returning from a bloody war and a group of left-wing journalists, all confronting each other in the heart of New York City on May Day at the end of World War I.

Inseparably associated with a point in history he claimed to despise, F. Scott Fitzgerald is both the quintessential Jazz-Age writer and perhaps the era's harshest critic. However, the complexity and sheer timelessness of classics such as The Great Gatsby has ensured that Fitzgerald's work will never be regarded as mere period pieces.

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read." -Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer "Small wonders." -Time Out London "[F]irst-rate...astutely selected and attractively packaged...indisputably great works." -Adam Begley, The New York Observer "I've always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it's the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher's fine 'Art of the Novella' series." -The New Yorker "The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed-tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are." -KQED (NPR San Francisco) "Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... elegant-looking paperback editions ...a good read in a small package." -The Wall Street Journal