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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 4 featuring Joseph O'Neill
Joseph O’Neill is the author of five novels, a collection of short stories, and a family history. His most recent book is the 2024 novel Godwin. His 2008 novel Netherland won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Two of his short stories have won O. Henry Prizes and his stories have been widely anthologized.
His fiction and cultural criticism has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and Granta. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Born in Ireland, he grew up in Mozambique, Iran, Turkey, and the Netherlands.
Chapter 4 of The Great Gatsby find narrator Nick Carraway tentatively learning about Jay Gatsby's shady background through a meeting with the notorious gambler Meyer Wolfshiem. Nick is both amazed and amused by Gatsby's prodigious lies about his background as they motor into New York City, crossing the Queensboro Bridge in a famous scene that captures the upheaval of the Jazz Age. After the meeting Nick learns from Jordan Baker the actual connection between Gatsby and Daisy Fay.