The Cubical City (Lost American fiction)

This finely crafted novel provides a memorable glimpse of life and love in New York in the 1920s. Janet Flanner, who as Genêt wrote a fort-nightly Letter from Paris” for the New Yorker magazine for almost fifty years, has recently told of her experiences in Paris in her widely acclaimed book Paris Was Yesterday. Here in her only published novel, The Cubical City, she provides an extraordinaryand memorableglimpse of the young artist in New York during the Jazz Age. In an Afterword written for this new edition she discusses the writer’s craft and her early schooling in and dedication to it. The story concerns the young, talented, and liberated Delia Poole who, after emerging from the Middle West and after a period of struggle, is enjoying success as a costume designer for New York musical reviews. In love with New York, established in her own studio, and enjoying life, she finds her life complicated by Paul, the impecunious suitor, and by the death of her father and her mother’s removal to New York.