Early last Thursday morning, Leonardo DiCaprio was sitting in the basement of The Darby as a long line of girls came toward him carrying bursting bottles of champagne affixed with firecrackers. Jay-Z held court in a corner booth. Tobey Maguire danced on a banquette. And Mr. DiCaprio—Jay Gatsby—looked on with a smile. The pitch of Read More
An Unbroken Series of Successful Gestures
The girls, so many girls, dressed in pastel-colored wraps that bared shoulders and the swells of their cleavage, clacked their Louboutin heels up a SoHo staircase one muggy May evening.
At the landing, visibly breathless and sweaty, their eyes lit up. They had entered the penthouse loft of Edward Scott Brady, the boyishly handsome world traveler, former classical cello virtuoso and “retired entrepreneur,” who was throwing a “Welcome Back Bash” to honor his return from his seventh trip around the globe. Read More
Last summer’s Midnight in Paris took as its subject a young writer given the tremendous opportunity to meet his literary idols–the writers of the expatriate clique, including Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway. It could as easily have been about any young writer or moviegoer as about Owen Wilson’s character, with Read More
On the farthest edge of Sands Point, L.I., the house known as Lands End stood wind-battered and decrepit, its face scarred from years of relentless salty gusts ripping off the top of Long Island Sound. In its last days it lingered there on the shore, barely past the water, as a colossal relic from the Read More
Those familiar with director Baz Luhrmann’s fixation with excess had every reason to look forward to his upcoming adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Sure, the subtle analysis of class warfare, sexuality, and post-war mores that enhance F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterwork will probably be excised, but who cares! Filtered through Baz’s indulgence-happy approach to the cinema, Read More
On Saturday night at KGB bar, there was a séance for F. Scott Fitzgerald.
“Have you ever conducted a séance before?” asked Goodman Carter, web editor for the literary magazine The Fiction Circus, to an onlooker intent on butting in on the preparations. Carter was fiddling with an EEG Read More
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald are the subjects of a new biographical musical, This Side of Paradise, opening Off-Broadway tomorrow.
The New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog has its reservations. They seem reasonable, even if we do like the idea of pitting Fitzgerald against Andrew Jackson. Let us take a Read More
The Hollywood Reporter reports that The Notebook director Nick Cassavetes has signed on to direct The Beautiful and The Damned, which would tackle the shiny, bright, and often thorny relationship between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre. Though the glamorous duo were considered the jazzy embodiment of the Roaring Twenties, things did not end Read More
ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN
By Keith Gessen
Viking, 242 pages, $24.95
The hazy golden specter of F. Scott Fitzgerald looms over all first novels by young white male Ivy League graduates, but it looms especially large over this one, by Keith Gessen, a limpid-eyed, sensual-mouthed founding editor of the intellectual journal Read More
Compiled as testament to the “belief in the story as a system of knowledge,” E.L. Doctorow’s book of essays provides a superb overview both of American literature and of the themes the author has taken up over his long and prolific career. Like his earlier collection, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution (1993), this gathering Read More
