Blame It On Phryne: Return to the Jazz Age

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

~F. Scott Fitzgerald

The fabulous Miss Phryne Fisher, Australia's divine and fearless 1920s detective, has her own TV series. Downton Abbey is moving into the Jazz Age.  Woody Allen made Midnight in Paris, then Magic in the Moonlight. Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby had everyone falling in love with this classic all over again. It's almost 2020, 100 years since the Jazz Age, and perhaps nostalgia has already kicked in, because there are currently a lot of Lost Generation items at the library that will have you wanting to bob your hair (women) and slouch around in your Oxford bags (men). If you want to feel a Roaring Twenties vibe, try kicking back with one of these likely titles!


Non-Fiction

Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation by Judith Mackrell

Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway's First Wife by Gioia Diliberto

American Cocktail: A "Colored Girl" in the World by Anita Reynolds with Howard M. Miller

Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance by Carla Kaplan

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell

Fiction

Bittersweet by Colleen McCullough

Empire Girls by Suzanne Hayes

The Perfume Collector by Kathleen Tessaro

The Last Nude by Ellis Avery

The Sisters by Nancy Jensen

The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty 

 Links

"Here's What a Bestseller Looked Like in the 1920s" [HuffPost Books]

"The Roar of the Crowd" [The New York Times]

"Hats, pearls, and all that jazz woo style mavens" [Christian Science Monitor]