Posted on 04/26/2013 1:58:11 PM PDT by Borges
“The Great Gatsby” has united generations of American readers with its crash-and-burn tale of empty elegance and impossible love on Long Island in the 1920s.
Now the novel is dividing the nation’s booksellers with dueling paperback editions: the enigmatic blue cover of the original and the movie tie-in book that went on sale Tuesday, a brash, flashy version with Leonardo DiCaprio front and center.
The new edition is timed with the 3-D film adaptation, directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Mr. DiCaprio, that will arrive in theaters on May 10.
So far this year, sales of the paperback with the original jacket art — a glowing cityscape and a pair of floating eyes — have been extraordinary. On Thursday, it was the top-selling book on Amazon.com. At Barnes & Noble stores last week, no other paperback book sold more copies. It has landed on best-seller lists for independent bookstores.
***
“It’s just God-awful,” Kevin Cassem, a bookseller at McNally Jackson, said on Tuesday. “ ‘The Great Gatsby’ is a pillar of American literature, and people don’t want it messed with. We’re selling the classic cover and have no intention of selling the new one.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Yes, you wanted to commit suicide about 3/4 of the way through.
Pray for America to Wake Up
ITA Read it in HS and it was simply BORING.
Huh? No great novel is depressing. Besides The problem with Jay Gatsby wasn’t that he was rich but that he didn’t see it as anything but a status.
Marketing genius.
Read it in high school. Can't remember a single thing about it, except being happy that it ended.
Old Man is EH at his near worst. Judge him by his short stories.
Depressing can have a reason, I said ridiculous and depressing because I think the plot is ridiculous.
IIRC, build an estate and hold parties hoping someone who lives nearby will show up? As opposed to knocking on the door, a letter, mutual acquaintance.
Pshaw! I TEACH Shakespeare-
to high schoolers. And American lit.
I resist an attempt from the Admin to make me drag them through deconstructional depressing dopey Old man and the Sea, Of Mice and Men Tender is the Night.
We read these guys but I choose.
Red Pony, Bernice Bobs Her Hair, excerpts from For Whom the Bell Tolls.
He saw it as a lifestyle.
I know. Hill Like White Elephants is brilliant. The theme is way not good for HS.
I have not read Bell Tolls...I assumed Sun also rises and farewell to rms were the best novels?
But my list is better.
Even it it were - which to me it is not, by a longshot - a paragraph of ”good writing” isn’t what makes a great novel, any more than a soliloquy makes a great play or a trumpet solo makes a great jazz piece.
You wrote:
“Necessary for people who care about the English language...”
Actually if you care about the English language you read Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, the KJV, and so on. I’ve done that.
“...or the American story,”
So the American Story is set only in 1922? There was no American story before or since?
“...or human beings.”
Wow, if people couldn’t read Gatsby until 1925, then, I guess no one could “care about...human beings” before that time, right?
“If none of this applies to you, by all means return to whatever it is you people do.”
Thankfully, my horizons are much bigger than The Great Gatsby. I realize good literature existed - in many languages - before 1925.
Well, for 10 grand it better be!
Again we’re talking about American lit...modernist lit at that.
Every episode of VH1s old “Behind the Music” tells basically the same story.............In the same way, only the names were changed.
Romulus said English language. You’ll have to take that up with him.
I remember being bored stiff with “Gatsby” until the last few chapters where the plot decided to get off its ass and get moving.
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