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.
Episodes
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 Am...
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 Priz...
Kim Stanley Robinson is, according to The New Yorker, “generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers.” He is the author of more than twenty novels, including the Orange County Trilogy, the Mars Trilogy, and the Science in the Capital Series. His 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future won the Best Foreign Novel award at the 2024 Grand Prix L’Imaginaire, honoring the best fiction or science fiction book...
Richard Russo is the author of ten novels, three collections of short stories, and two books of non-fiction. His most recent book is his 2023 novel Somebody’s Fool. Life and Art, a collection of his essays, will be published in May 2025. His 2001 novel Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize and his story “Horseman” was included in the 2007 volume of The Best American Short Stories.
In 2017 he received France’s Grand Prix de Littératur...
Robert Olen Butler is the author of sixteen novels, six short story collections, and a non-fiction book on The Process of Writing Fiction; his most recent book is his 2021 novel Late City, with his new novel Twice Around a Marriage scheduled for Fall 2025 publication.
His 1992 short story collection A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain won the Pulitzer Prize. His short stories have received two Pushcart Prizes and have been reprint...
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...
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 re...
Jane Smiley is the author of seventeen novels, two collections of short stories, five books of non-fiction, eight young adult novels, and a children’s book. Her most recent book is her 2024 novel, Lucky. She has won three O. Henry Awards for her short fiction.
In 1981, she received the Friends of American Writers Prize for her novel At Paradise Gate; in 1992, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Ci...
Jonathan Franzen is the author of six novels, most recently Crossroads and Purity, and five works of nonfiction, including The Discomfort Zone, Farther Away, and The End of the End of the Earth.
Among his honors are the National Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Award, the Heartland Prize, Die Welt Literature Prize, the Budapest Grand Prize, and the first Carlos Fuentes Medal awarded at the Guadalajara International Book Fai...
In this inaugural episode of our subseries Worlds of the Imaginary, Troy University freshman Jason Frye and Kirk Curnutt discuss the grandfather of all sci-fi novels: H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, first published in 1895 when its author was still in his twenties. Although not the first-ever time travel adventure (Wells himself had previously published a story called "The Chronic Argonauts"), the story of an unnamed...
In our second installment of the ALA Conversations series, Society for the Study of the American Short Story president James Nagel speaks with Kasia Boddy (University of Cambridge) and Oliver Scheiding (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) about the almost alchemical ability of the short story to adapt to new narrative platforms. The unique tenacity of the genre has allowed it to remain vibrant and relevant while competing prose fo...
ALA executive director Alfred Bendixen explores with a roundtable of faculty from diverse institutions the challenges of teaching American literature during the Coronavirus crisis and the imperative of addressing social-justice issues in the aftermath of May 2020 George Floyd murder. Speakers include Hubert Cook (Connecticut College), Kirk Curnutt (Troy University), Karen Kilcup (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Leslie Pe...