Recommendations from our site
“BAFTA-winning actor Jake Gyllenhaal becomes Nick Carraway, our guide through the glittering yet destructive pull of materialism in pre-Depression New York. Listening time is just under five hours.” Read more...
“The book showcases both the allure and the ricketiness of the American dream. The story shows the American dream is fragile despite its potency and persistence. It shows its perpetual obsolescence. We often hear that it’s harder to rise from the bottom to the top in the US than it is in many other countries. Even in Fitzgerald’s day, the fluidity of society was fading. Perhaps The Great Gatsby still seems germane because of the way it showed the mismatch between American actualities and American ideals, the two-faced character of the American dream, its materialism and idealism.” Read more...
“So much of reading that book is trying to figure out who Jay Gatsby or James Gatz is and, by extension, what it means to exist as a person in the world or a character in a work of fiction.” Read more...
The best books on Personality Types
Merve Emre, Literary Scholar
“Gatsby is a book that is, in some ways, ambivalent about glamour and wealth. It entices us with the glamour of the parties and the wonderful material aspects of Gatsby’s life – but it shows that his falling for the false promises of materialism destroys him. The phrase that Fitzgerald uses, which I really like, is “enchanted objects”. Gatsby is a book about what we now call conspicuous consumption – the symbolic objects that are of terrible importance to all of us, and may have terrible effects on us, but we still seem to want them.” Read more...
Sarah Churchwell, Literary Scholar
