Save Me The Waltz

Prominent literary society spouses F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald famously chronicled their stormy marriage in Tender is the Night and Save Me the Waltz, respectively, providing conflicting yet remarkably consistent views of a marriage besieged by personal illness and neglect. A deliberately ambitious work, Tender is the Night is the compelling story of Dick Diver, a gifted psychoanalyst at the beginning of his career, his wife Nicole, one of his patients, and their holiday encounter with Rosemary Hoyt. Tender is the Night was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final, and most autobiographical, novel, capturing in fiction the complexity, frustration, and depth and ultimate destruction of love between Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, who was at the time of writing confined in a mental institution. Save Me the Waltz follows the story of southern belle Alabama Beggs who is married to the successful, but philandering, artist David Knight. Desperate for David’s attention and for success in her own right, Alabama devotes herself to building, and ultimately achieving, success as a ballerina. Written while Zelda Fitzgerald was being treated for schizophrenia at the Phipps Clinic, Save Me Waltz is evocative of high society in the Jazz Age and a woman’s quest to define herself both within and outside of her marriage. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

Acclaimed illustrator Jennifer Phelan reimagines Wade Hemsworth’s iconic log driver in a beautiful, contemporary picture-book adaptation of a beloved Canadian classic. If you ask any girl from the parish around What pleases her most from her head to her toes She’ll say I'm not sure that it’s business of yours But I do like to waltz with a log driver Based on the perennially popular Canadian folk song and animated short film of the same name, The Log Driver’s Waltz showcases a spunky, independent young woman whose parents are keen for her to marry. The town’s well-to-do doctors, merchants, and lawyers try to impress her, but it’s the humble log driver—with his style, grace, and joie de vivre—who captures her attention. When she and the log driver finally meet on the dance floor, their joy leaps off the page. With homages to the original film, and celebrating the flora, fauna, and folk art of this great land, The Log Driver’s Waltz brings a hallmark of Canadian childhood to life.

Long out of print, this Highsmith classic resurfaces with a vengeance. The great revival of interest in Patricia Highsmith continues with the publication of this novel that will give dog owners nightmares for years to come. With an eerie simplicity of style, Highsmith turns our next-door neighbors into sadistic psychopaths, lying in wait among white picket fences and manicured lawns. In A Dog's Ransom, Highsmith blends a savage humor with brilliant social satire in this dark tale of a highminded criminal who hits a wealthy Manhattan couple where it hurts the most when he kidnaps their beloved poodle. This work attesets to Highsmith's reputation as "the poet of apprehension" (Graham Greene).

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE TELEVISION DRAMA Z: THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler's New York Times bestseller Z brings us Zelda's irresistible story as she herself might have told it. I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we're ruined, Look closer...and you'll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed. When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the "ungettable" Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner's, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick's Cathedral and take the rest as it comes. What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel—and his witty, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera—where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein. Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby's parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous—sometimes infamous—husband? How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott's, too?

“Profound, overwhelmingly moving . . . a richly complex love story.” — New York Times Acclaimed biographer Nancy Milford brings to life the tormented, elusive personality of Zelda Sayre and clarifies as never before Zelda’s relationship with her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald—tracing the inner disintegration of a gifted, despairing woman, torn by the clash between her husband’s career and her own talent. Zelda Sayre’s stormy life spanned from notoriety as a spirited Southern beauty to success as a gifted novelist and international celebrity at the side of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda and Fitzgerald were one of the most visible couples of the Jazz Age, inhabiting and creating around them a world of excitement, romance, art, and promise. Yet their tumultuous relationship precipitated a descent into depression and mental instability for Zelda, leaving her to spend the final twenty years of her life in hospital care, until a fire at a sanitarium claimed her life. Incorporating years of exhaustive research and interviews, Milford illuminates Zelda’s nuanced and elusive personality, giving character to both her artistic vibrancy and to her catastrophic collapse.

A compulsively readable book about the literary marriage of a great American writer and his talented yet often overlooked wife, who succumbed to madness as her husband rose to worldwide fame.

“Pure and lovely…to read Zelda’s letters is to fall in love with her.” —The Washington Post Edited by renowned Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, with an introduction by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, this compilation of over three hundred letters tells the couple's epic love story in their own words. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's devotion to each other endured for more than twenty-two years, through the highs and lows of his literary success and alcoholism, and her mental illness. In Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, over 300 of their collected love letters show why theirs has long been heralded as one of the greatest love stories of the 20th century. Edited by renowned Fitzgerald scholars Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, with an introduction by Scott and Zelda's granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, this is a welcome addition to the Fitzgerald literary canon.