The hype keeps building for Baz Luhrmann’s oft-delayed Great Gatsby adaptation. The first trailer had the whole internet up in a tizzy, and now the latest teaser from Beyoncé and Andre 3000’s “Back to Black” cover has even more people interested. Perhaps, in order to wind down, we should all check out the first cinematic reworking of Fitzgerald’s classic. Over at Open Culture, fans can get a look at The Only Known Footage of the 1926 Film Adaptation of The Great Gatsby (Which F. Scott Fitzgerald Hated).
Gatsby As He Was; Gatsby As He Will Be
“The year we killed our teacher”
What's the only thing nicer than new fiction by Hilary Mantel? New fiction by Hilary Mantel that you can read for free. At the LRB, check out the entirety of her latest, "Kinsella in His Hole."
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Fantastical Fowl
What’s the deal with all the fake birds animated into fantasy and sci-fi films these days? According to Brian Thill, these digital flocks “aren't just there to make the unreal scenes feel a bit more real” but are rather signifiers of “our oldest and most common metaphor for freedom.” What to make of their ability to evade disaster or succumb to it, however, is another story entirely.
Why is historical fiction maligned?
In The Morning News, Jessica Francis Kane asks where is the line drawn between literary fiction and historical fiction; why is historical fiction maligned; and what happens when you write a novel and one of the characters attends your reading?
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Smith Wins Bailey’s
Ali Smith's How to Be Both has won the Bailey's Prize for women's fiction, placing her in the same ranks as Zadie Smith and Lionel Shriver. If you're not too familiar with Smith's work, Jonathan Russell Clark wrote about her for The Millions last year.
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Killers of the Bidding War
This week in news that's almost impossible to believe: after an intense bidding war, the rights to David Grann's upcoming book Killers of the Flower Moon were bought by Imperative Entertainment for a whopping five million dollars. All this for a nonfiction book that isn't due out for well over a year. Killers of the Flower Moon tells the story of the investigation into the mysterious deaths of several Osage Indians in the 1920s, who were at the time some of the wealthiest people in the world. The case was one of the first ever worked by the FBI.
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On Zadie Smith and Barack Obama
Electric Literature's blog The Outlet begins a series of essays with the question: "Is Zadie Smith the Barack Obama of literature?"
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Back to School
Need your monthly dose of Hilary Mantel? The two-time Booker Prize winner has a new story in the London Review of Books (which you can read at their website). The story is a nice complement to our interview with the author from last year.
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