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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 9 featuring Gish Jen and Alice McDermott
Gish Jen is the author of five novels, two collections of short stories, and two non-fiction books. Her most recent works include the 2020 novel The Resisters and the 2022 short story collection Thank You, Mr. Nixon. Her new novel Bad Bad Girl will be published in October 2025. Five of her stories have been selected for volumes of the Best American Short Stories and her story “Birthmates” was selected by John Updike for The Best American Short Stories of the Century. This spring she will be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels and a book of non-fiction. Her most recent books are her 2024 novel Absolution and What About the Baby?, her 2021 collection of essays. Her 1998 novel Charming Billy won the National Book Award and the American Book Award; her 2017 novel The Ninth Hour won the Prix Femina étranger; and Absolution won the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. In 2010 she received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Excellence in American Literature.
Chapter 9 finds Nick Carraway meditating on the tragedy of Jay Gatsby's fabulist career and all-too-real death. Fearing scandal, the partygoers who once flooded West Egg are nowhere to be found when Gatsby is buried. Not even Meyer Wolfshiem makes an appearance, and Daisy never calls. As Nick considers these betrayals, he offers some of the novel's most famous lines, including the beautiful passage on the Midwest; Nick's indictment of Tom and Daisy as careless people; and, of course, the novel's rapturously melancholy ending, which captures the conundrum of American optimism and guileless faith in promise in the beautiful image of boats riding against the currents of time.