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The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Presents Gatsby Centennial Readings
On April 10, 2025, The Great Gatsby---widely heralded as among the greatest of all American novels---celebrates its centennial. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society is marking this landmark with a weekly chapter-by-chapter reading of the novel featuring eleven of the most significant American fiction writers of our day. Episodes will be released weekly beginning on February 13. Here is the schedule:
February 13 Chapter 1 Jonathan Franzen
February 20 Chapter 2 Jane Smiley
February 27 Chapter 3 Ann Beattie
March 6 Chapter 4 Joseph O’Neill
March 13 Chapter 5 Robert Olen Butler
March 20 Chapter 6 Richard Russo
March 27 Chapter 7 Kim Stanley Robinson/ Maxine Hong Kingston
April 3 Chapter 8 Francine Prose
April 10 Chapter 9 Gish Jen/ Alice McDermott
Episodes are also available for download on the Fitzgerald Society website (www.fscottfitzgeraldsociety.org) and on the Society's YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@f.scottfitzgeraldsociety8488). It's truly a different and unique experience luxuriating in Fitzgerald's luminescent prose hearing his cadences read aloud by these voices.
The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Presents Gatsby Centennial Readings
Gatsby@100 Chapter 3 featuring Ann Beattie
Ann Beattie is the author of nine novels, twelve collections of short stories, a children’s book, and two non-fiction books. Her most recent publications are the 2023 short story collection Onlookers and More to Say: Essays and Appreciations, also published in 2023.
Her short stories have appeared in five O. Henry Prize collections, in The Best American Short Stories and in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She has received the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story and the Rea Award for the Short Story. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A graduate of American University and the University of Connecticut, she has taught at Harvard, the University of Connecticut, and for many years at the University of Virginia.
Chapter 3 of The Great Gatsby is a tour-de-force depiction of one of Jay Gatsby's frenetic parties. Here Nick Carraway finally meets his next-door neighbor and discovers a surprising connection with him involving the Great War. As Nick embarks on a relationship with Jordan Baker we are introduced to one of the novel's central metaphors of the "careless driver."