On Booze

by F Scott Fitzgerald

“First you take a drink,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, “then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” Fitzgerald wrote alcohol into almost every one of his stories. On Booze gathers debutantes and dandies, rowdy jazz musicians, lost children and ragtime riff-raff into a newly compiled collection taken from The Crack-Up, and other works. On Booze portrays “The Jazz Age” as Fitzgerald experienced it: roaring, rambunctious, and lush – with quite a hangover.

• ISBN10: 1447202481
• ISBN13: 9781447202486
• Publish Date: 24 May 2012 (first published 4 November 2011)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Imprint: Picador
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 96
• Language: English

Reviews

[brokentune]

Review first posted on BookLikes:
http://brokentune.booklikes.com/post/826967/on-booze

On Booze...I wish I had been when reading this.

This is a collection of short stories and fragments of Fitzgerald's notes and unfinished pieces. It's not polished and when reading it I could not help but feel that this was thrown together by an editor to create a freebie book to go with a re-issue of FSF's novels.

If you are a die hard fan, the short stories are worth reading but they are not of the same strength as the ones published throughout FSF's life time.

There are some insights into FSF's relationship with alcohol which are moving and which foreshadow the tragedy of his own fate, but again this describes only the smallest part of this collection.