The Great Gatsby. Directed by Marc Bruni, libretto by Kait Kerrigan, Jason Howland, and Nathan Tysen, performances by Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada, The Broadway Theater, 2024. We have never reviewed a theatrical production in these spaces, although we have made a few stage notes from time to time about productions we were involved with. … Continue reading The Great Gatsby (Musical) – Review →

K. Woodman-Maynard. The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Novel Adaptation. Candlewick, 2021. Wow! Already a 2021 book reviewed here! This is a lovely graphic novel based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Virtually all the narration and spoken lines are taken from the book. In that sense, it is like watching a BBC miniseries based … Continue reading The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Novel Adaptation – Review →

Zane Grey. The Call of the Canyon. 1921; Black, 1952. Many years ago we read Riders of the Purple Sage and thoroughly enjoyed it. On vacation, we came across an old copy of another Zane Grey book that had gone through a number of editions and decided to read it. It was fun to read, … Continue reading The Call of the Canyon – Review →

F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Pat Hobby Stories. Scribner’s, 1962. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s reputation grows out of his stories of the 1920’s “Jazz Age,” especially the upper classes, or as some like to say, the rich and the rotten. That is true of all his completed novels and most of his better known short stories like … Continue reading The Pat Hobby Stories – Review →

Sarah Churchwell. Careless People. Penguin, 2014. No serious book is written in America nowadays which does not carry its implied or direct criticism of our ideals, our scheme of life, our cultural attainments.                 —Burton Rascoe 1922 (40) He is intensely preoccupied with the eternal verities and insoluble problems of this world. To discuss them while … Continue reading Careless People – Review →

Michael Farris Smith. Nick. Little Brown, 2021. I was looking forward to reading Nick. Critics seemed to like this novel supposedly about Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, before he met Jay Gatsby. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I was really disappointed. We meet Nick on the battlefields of France in … Continue reading Nick – Review →

Agatha Christie. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. 1926. The Agatha Christie Collection, Create Space, 2019. I read recently that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was voted the best mystery novel of the Twentieth Century by a committee of 600 mystery writers. Wow! One could modify Ecclesiastes 12:12 by saying, “Of the making of mystery books … Continue reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Review →

Maureen Corrigan. So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures. Little Brown, 2014. So We Read On is a collection of seven essays by the author, a literary critic for NPR, about F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby. Because the different essays each have a different focus, … Continue reading So We Read On – Review →

Lisa Klaussmann. Tigers in Red Weather. Little Brown, 2012. Poet Wallace Stevens wrote:         Only here and there, an old sailor         Drunk and asleep in his boots,         Catches tigers         In red weather. It is a well-known poem called “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” which the poet describes disappointment with those who are well off and could be … Continue reading Tigers in Red Weather – Review →