At Scott and Zelda’s Final Resting Place, Gatsby Lives

Author Francis Scott Fitzgerald in an undated photo.

By Michael Winship

With all the fanfare around the new movie version of The Great Gatsby, directed by Baz Luhrmann with a screenplay by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, it’s a great time to go back to the book and be reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegant, graceful writing; so fragile and yes, unique, that it may never really be brought successfully to the screen.A good time, too, to be reminded of how the book’s depiction of conspicuous consumption during the Jazz Age of the 1920s — and the stark contrast between rich and poor — so parallel life in New York today, where, as The New York Times reported last year, “The poverty rate reached its highest point in more than a decade, and the income gap in Manhattan, already wider than almost anywhere else in the country, rivaled disparities in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Daisy Buchanan, the object of Gatsby’s desire, and her husband Tom would feel at home in the 1% world of overindulgence and profligacy. As Fitzgerald famously described them:

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Books that illuminated gay life for Americans

The Boy Scout Handbook offers good advice about how to read

By Ron Charles

The Boy Scouts of America announced today that it would delay any decision about its policy on gay members until May. That gives the leadership three months to catch up on some good books.

As you might expect, “The Boy Scouts Handbook” offers practical advice on many things, even how to read: “The book should be held on a level with the face and not too close. Sit erect. Reading when lying down or from the light of the fireplace is unwise.”

But “The Handbook” is less helpful on what to read. As they deliberate the knotty question of whether to welcome gay members, the Boy Scout executives might consider selecting — wisely and on the level — from these titles that have helped many Americans open their hearts and minds:

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Aaron Swartz, American hero

By Tim Lee

Paul Graham, the founder of angel investing firm Y Combinator, has mentored generations of Silicon Valley whiz kids. In an essay about hackers and the role they’ve played driving technology forward, he wrote that “hackers are unruly. That is the essence of hacking. And it is also the essence of Americanness.” Those three sentences are a perfect description of one of Graham’s mentees in particular: Aaron Swartz.

Swartz was not a patient man. With immense talent and strong passions, he had a tendency to attack problems head-on, defying authority and convention if necessary. For a little more than a decade, this approach produced spectacular results. But on Friday, facing federal charges that could put him in prison for decades, Swartz took his own life. He was 26.

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Best books of 2012

 PHOTOS | As the end of the year approaches, we’ve chosen our favorite fiction, nonfiction and graphic novels from 2012.

 

• Top 10 books of 2012
• Best graphic novels of 2012
• 50 notable works of fiction
• 50 notable works of nonfiction
• The year in literary news
• Best audiobooks of 2012

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Amazon finds its books aren’t welcome at many bookstores

 By Nora Krug

“Care of Wooden Floors,” by Will Wiles, is the kind of novel you’d expect to see on a “staff picks” shelf at an independent bookstore. A slim but sophisticated farce by a relatively unknown author, the book is full of witty asides and snappy comments about modern life; its wry, endearingly hapless narrator feels like he might have stepped out of a Nick Hornbystory.

But many local stores, both independents and chains, are refusing to stock it. They don’t want to promote what they see as a predatory publisher. “Care of Wooden Floors” was issued this month by New Harvest, a new collaboration between Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the arch-nemesis of brick-and-mortar bookstores: Amazon.

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National Book Award finalists announced

‘The Yellow Birds’ by Kevin Powers

By Ron Charles

Stories about the Iraq War hold a prominent place in this year’s National Book Award nominations. “The Yellow Birds,” a debut novel by Iraq vet Kevin Powers, and “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” by Ben Fountain, are among the five finalists for the fiction award. Both novels, which have received positive reviews in The Washington Post and elsewhere, are powerful tales about soldiers coming back from battle.

This year’s finalists are a star-studded group notable for their critical and popular success, although major novels from Richard Ford, Michael Chabon and Barbara Kingsolver are absent from the list.

The other three fiction finalists are “A Hologram for the King,” about an American businessman in Saudi Arabia, by Dave Eggers, who won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2009; “The Round House,” the story of an Ojibwe boy whose mother is attacked, by Louise Erdrich; and “This Is How You Lose Her,” short stories by Junot Diaz, a recent MacArthur “genius grant” winner whose previous novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.

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Calvin Trillin’s ‘Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin’ wins Thurber Prize for American Humor

A collection of humorist Calvin Trillin’s writings called “Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff” has won the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

The award is named for humorist James Thurber, who was known for the short stories and cartoons he contributed to The New Yorker magazine. It first was presented in 1997.

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Chilean Allende wins Danish literature prize for ‘magical storytelling’

Chilean author Isabel Allende has won a Danish literature prize for her “magical and spellbinding storytelling.”

The 500,000 kroner ($86,000) Hans Christian Andersen Literature Prize is given to a writer whose works compare with those of the legendary Andersen, who was born in 1805 and wrote about 160 fairytales and poems before his death in 1875.

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Why the embargo on Rowling’s ‘Casual Vacancy’ didn’t hold

When critics are supposed to abide by rules, the urge to be the first can be irresistible.

By Neely Tucker

The embargo on the J.K. Rowling novel “The Casual Vacancy,” reportedly one of the most draconian non-disclosure agreements in the history of publishing . . . did not quite work. ¶ Thursday is the release date for the first book for adults written by the empress of Hogwarts. Reviews were embargoed until 1 a.m. and book sales until 3 a.m. Since Rowling’s Harry Potter books have sold more than 450 million copies worldwide, the release of her new book — even though it is set in an unmagical British town called Pagford — is one of 2012’s largest publishing events. ¶ Thus, it is a test case for the common, if unloved, practice of forbidding booksellers from selling the book in advance of the embargo date, and forbidding media outlets from reviewing said tome before the date the publishing company decrees. ¶ The practice generally has several intents: to make sure books are in stores when readers hear about them; to retain the news revelations in nonfiction books; and to try to bottle up interest in big fiction titles, propelling them onto bestseller lists with an unusually high number of immediate sales.

“For franchise authors, you want to drive it to Number 1 by having everyone buy it the first week of release,” said Elyse Cheney, a literary agent in New York.

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Ray Bradbury dies: Science fiction author of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ and ‘Martian Chronicles’ was 91

  By Becky Krystal

Ray Bradbury, a boundlessly imaginative novelist who wrote some of the most popular science fiction books of all time, including “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Martian Chronicles,” and who transformed the genre of flying saucers and little green men into a medium exploring childhood terrors, colonialism and the erosion of individual thought, died June 5. He was 91.

The death was announced by the Associated Press.

Mr. Bradbury, who began his career in the 1930s contributing stories to pulp-fiction magazines, received a special Pulitzer Prize citation in 2007 “for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.”

His body of work, which continued to appear through recent years to terrific reviews, encompassed more than 500 titles, including novels, plays (“Dandelion Wine,” adapted from his 1957 semi-autobiographical novel), children’s books and short stories. His tales were often adapted for film, including the futuristic story of a book-burning society (director François Truffaut’s “Fahrenheit 451,” in 1966), a suspense story about childhood fears (“Something Wicked This Way Comes” in 1983) and the more straightforward alien attack story (“It Came From Outer Space” in 1953).

 

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