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2 Books for Jazz Age Enthusiasts

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2 Books for Jazz Age Enthusiasts

Any discussion of the New York 1920s avant-garde must include Van Vechten — music critic, drama critic, photographer, novelist, Florine Stettheimer subject, and friend and editor to Gertrude Stein, among many, many other things. Van Vechten is frequently described as a champion of the Harlem Renaissance and is often credited with sparking interest among white bohemians (and bored socialites) with jazz and Black culture. For a full and nuanced portrait of his contradictory and wildly prolific life and career, I implore you to read his collected correspondence with Langston Hughes as well as Edward White’s excellent 2014 biography, “The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.”

For 1920s backbiting, read “Parties.”

This brisk, brief comic novel follows Hamish (a thinly disguised stand-in for Van Vechten) as he chronicles the exploits of the alcoholic David and his flaky wife, Rilda (thinly disguised Scott and Zelda), along with a cast of jaded frauds, hangers-on and actual artists. There are speakeasies and post-speakeasy trips to Harlem and lots of cocaine and tons of empty, casual sex. There’s a silent movie actress, “Midnight Blue,” who won’t be touched by “anything but silk and flesh.” There’s a murder. And there are parties — endless, pointless rounds of them.

“Hamish had been to a tea, as cocktail parties are still occasionally called in New York, for the great English novelist, attended by most of the local literati. The visiting celebrity talked a great deal about himself, his plots and plans, and the others talked a great deal about themselves, their plots and plans. Fortunately, nobody listened to anybody else. Hamish left this house to drift, by way of taxi, into another cocktail party given for a lady who had left society to become an actress by an actress who had given up the stage to become a lady. They both explained why at great length, although everybody had heard the story many times before. But that was quite all right because again nobody listened.”

The book, described in these pages as having “closed out the Jazz Age,” flopped on the heels of the stock market crash. But for anyone who wants to understand that feverish moment in America beyond long necklaces and recherché cocktails, I think it’s essential reading.

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Try This Quiz on Passionate Lines From Popular Literature

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Try This Quiz on Passionate Lines From Popular Literature

Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of memorable lines. This week’s installment is all about love, highlighting lines about attraction and relationships from popular novels and short stories published in the late 20th century. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you want to experience the entire work in context.

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Video: Farewell, Pocket Books

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Video: Farewell, Pocket Books

new video loaded: Farewell, Pocket Books

Our books reporter Elizabeth A. Harris explores the disappearance of mass market paperbacks — and talks with Stephen King about what paperbacks have meant to him.

By Elizabeth A. Harris, Léo Hamelin and Laura Salaberry

February 6, 2026

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Is Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ Actually the Greatest Love Story of All Time?

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Is Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ Actually the Greatest Love Story of All Time?

Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.”

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Catherine and Heathcliff. Since 1847, when Emily Brontë published her only novel, “Wuthering Heights,” those ill-starred lovers have inflamed the imaginations of generations of readers.

Who are these two? Definitely not the people you meet on vacation. The DNA of “Wuthering Heights,” set in a wild and desolate corner of Northern England, runs through the dark, gothic, obsessive strains of literary romance. Heathcliff, a tormented soul with terrible manners and a worse temper, may be the English novel’s most problematic boyfriend — mad, bad and dangerous to know. What redeems him, at least in the reader’s eyes, is Catherine’s love.

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As children growing up in the same highly dysfunctional household, the two form a bond more passionate than siblinghood and purer than lust. (I don’t think a 179-year-old book can be spoiled, but some plot details will be revealed in what follows.) They go on to marry other people, living as neighbors and frenemies without benefits until tragedy inevitably strikes. In the meantime, they roil and seethe — it’s no accident that “wuthering” is a synonym for “stormy” — occasionally erupting into ardent eloquence.

Take this soliloquy delivered by Catherine to Nelly Dean, a patient and observant maidservant who narrates much of the novel:

This all-consuming love, thwarted in the book by circumstances, has flourished beyond its pages. Thanks to Catherine and Heathcliff — and also to the harsh, windswept beauty of the Yorkshire setting — “Wuthering Heights,” a touchstone of Victorian literature, has become a fixture of popular culture.

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Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon played Heathcliff and Catherine in William Wyler’s 1939 multi-Oscar-nominated film adaptation.

Since then, the volatile Heathcliff has been embodied by a succession of British brooders: Richard Burton, Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hardy. At least for Gen X, the definitive Catherine will always be Kate Bush, dancing across the English countryside in a bright red dress in an indelible pre-MTV music video.

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Now, just in time for Valentine’s Day, we’ll have Emerald Fennell’s new R-rated movie version, with Margot Robbie (recently Barbie) as Catherine and Jacob Elordi (recently Frankenstein’s monster) as Heathcliff.

Is theirs the greatest love story of all time, as the movie’s trailer insists? It might be. For the characters, the love itself overwhelms every other consideration of feeling. For Brontë, the most accomplished poet in a family of formidable novelists, that love is above all a matter of words. The immensity of Catherine and Heathcliff’s passion is measured by the intensity of their language, which of course is also Brontë’s.

Here is Heathcliff, in his hyperbolic fashion, belittling Catherine’s marriage to the pathetic Linton:

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Which is what romance lives to do. It’s a genre often proudly unconstrained by what is possible, rational or sane, unafraid to favor sensation over sense or to pose unanswerable questions about the human heart. How could Catherine love a man like Heathcliff? How could he know himself to be worthy of her love?

We’ll never really have the answers, which is why we’ll never stop reading. And why no picture will ever quite match the book’s thousands of feverish, hungry, astonishing words.

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