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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 8 featuring Francine Prose
Francine Prose is the author of twenty novels, three collections of short stories, eleven non-fiction books, and a children’s book. Her most recent books include her 2021 novel The Vixen and 1974: A Personal History, published in 2024. Her 1973 novel Judah the Pious won the National Jewish Book Award; her 1983 novel Hungry Hearts won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award; and her 2005 novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 1988 she received the PEN Translation Prize.
Chapter 8 is the novel's shortest but in many ways most intense. After Myrtle Wilson's agonizing death, Jay Gatsby weighs whether Daisy Buchanan will actually leave her husband. The novel includes one final flashback to the couple's 1917 romance detailing Gatsby's bewitchment. Meanwhile, the enraged widower George Wilson plots revenge on the driver of the yellow car that mowed down his wife.