The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: And Other Tales of the Jazz Age

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Tales of the Jazz Age" is a collection of eleven short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Divided into three separate parts, according to subject matter, it includes one of his better-known short stories, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". Several of the stories had also been published earlier, independently, in either The Metropolitan, Saturday Evening Post, Smart Set, Collier's, Chicago Tribune, or Vanity Fair.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was released as a motion picture late in the 2008 season starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and directed by David Fincher. The screenplay differs greatly from the short story. Only the title, Benjamin's name, and most aspects of the aging process are retained in the screenplay.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781471018848

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is best known for his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, the quintessential tale of the decadence and overindulgence of the Jazz Age. Born into an upper middle-class family in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised in New York. After dropping out of Princeton University in 1917 to join the Army, he was stationed in Alabama, where he met wealthy socialite Zelda Sayre. It was only after he achieved moderate success with his debut novel This Side of Paradise that Zelda agreed to marry him. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, propelled him to literary stardom, the volatile nature of which inspired his best-known work The Great Gatsby. Though it met with mixed reviews in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, The Great Gatsby is now considered by some literary scholars to be the “Great American Novel.” Haunted by alcoholism, declining popularity, and financial difficulties well into the 1930s, Fitzgerald died in 1940. An unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously in 1941. 

Reviews for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

[madepercy-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The more I learn about Fitzgerald the more I am sad that he did not realise his impact during his own lifetime. I guess that those who contribute the most never do. I enjoyed the author's little introductions to each story which give a nice little preface. Every story in this is a gem, even if some of them are repeats from other FSF collations. I am still unable to comprehend how FSF could fathom, in his early twenties, what it was like to be an age he never reached. Overall, brilliant.

[brokentune · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Over the last 10 minutes I must have switched between 3 and 4 stars about 20 times - but I did really like most of the short stories.

Fitzgerald has a way of creating the not always endearing but nevertheless interesting characters in his short stories that are sadly missing in his novels (The Great Gatsby excepted).

[alanteder · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I'm not a big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short fiction so I originally purchased this audiobook to help me get through the reading of a print copy. I did manage to finish both the Penguin Classics paperback edition (which includes both of Fitzgerald's 1st and 2nd short story collections "Flappers and Philosophers" and "Tales of the Jazz Age") and this audiobook edition which includes only the 2nd book.The audiobook reading was quite stiff with very little attempt to give a voice performance. The stories "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and "O Russet Witch!" were some of the few exceptions with their minimal efforts at elderly voices. None of the other stories had a very dramatized reading. I noticed that a reference to Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" was pronounced as "The Ballad of Reading Goal" i.e. as in football goal, so obviously no research was done to learn that "gaol" is an antiquated spelling of the word "jail".I also noticed that, compared to the print edition, the sentence "It's very white of you." is censored to say "It's very nice of you." in the "O Russet Witch!" story. That seemed a bit odd in a book where the whole racist Shangri-La story of "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is included verbatim.At $1.95 for the member's price on Audible.com, this is definitely a bargain for a 10+ hour book. You get what you pay for though.

[gracez-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really like Fitzgerald's writing, and his short stories were very interesting. The last few were a little repetitive, I thought, concerning as they did sad young couples with young children falling apart, but overall there was a very interesting mix of New York socialite stories, stories with some very strange, almost fantastical events (such as "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and "O Russet Witch"). My favorite of the collection is probably "The Lees of Happiness", which I found very moving and interesting. I'll definitely keep reading Fitzgerald's short stories after this.

[phlll_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A series of unconnected short stories and plays, most notably containing "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

If you've only seen the movie, the premise is similar but the story is a bit different. I like the short story much better.

Most of the stories are pretty good, some not so much. It's a reasonably quick read.

[fuzzy_patters · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This short story collection was written very early in Fitzgerald's career (1922), and you can tell. there are moments of brilliance, such as "Oh Russet Witch" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." There are moments of great comedy, such as "The Camel's Back," and there are moments of Hollywood blockbuster type action, such as "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz." There is also "May Day," which is on the verge of greatness but could have used some fine tuning. Unfortunately, there are also several stories that a more mature author would have never allowed to see the light of day. These are stories that were over-indulgent moments from a young author who admits in the introduction of the book that they were written more to entertain himself than anything else. You can see the burgeoning brilliance that will write The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, but it isn't quite here yet with the exception of a few stories.

[bzedan_2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I read this collection solely for "Diamond as Big as the Ritz", which is one of my fave short stories. The last two in this collection are why too jumpy and unsure, but besides that, the stories are all pretty dang solid. Oh Fitzgerald.