Episode 75: The Great Gatsby

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07/04/21 • 80 min

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Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective

If you’re one of those try-hards who read this for the AP Lit test (and we are), you’ll be pleased to see us finally take this one on. This week we have F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, which is about extremely non-embarrassing things like throwing enormous parties so your ex-girlfriend will notice you. We talk about Fitzgerald’s accounts of sex and money, gender and sexuality, and Long Island guys who are really transplants so they go particularly hard.

We read the Scribner edition with introduction by Jesmyn Ward. For a wild ride, read Gore Vidal’s “Scott’s Case,” published in the May 1 1980 issue of The New York Review of Books, as it contains some truly wacky bon mots, like “All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars,” which... probably not?

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Previous Episode

Episode 74: Dune

It is time to ride the worm and ask the eternal question “what’s in the box?” This week we have Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic about a future where drugs have replaced computers, the nuns are magic and scary, money is worm [redacted], and the East India Company rules space. We chat about this book’s politics, and we get into religion, time, and environmentalism. You simply must try the spice. Everything will make sense. Even the terrifying toddlers in grim reaper robes. Fear is the mind killer.

We read the Penguin edition with an afterword by Brian Herbert. Check out Jordan S. Carroll’s excellent piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books “Race Consciousness: Fascism and Frank Herbert’s Dune,” which we read excerpts from in this episode.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Next Episode

Episode 76: Silas Marner

The Bible says something somewhere about children who are worth their weight in gold. Well, George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) explores what would happen if we took that proverb super literally! (Or figuratively? Mythically! That’s it. Or is this more of a fable? Wait, it’s a realist novel???) Silas Marner is about a linen weaver in the Midlands countryside whom the village folk assume is Gandalf (natch) and who adopts a daughter who mysteriously appears at his door. But, as with everything Eliot wrote, it’s also about, uh, everything -- industrialization, capital, parentage, class, religion and modernity, epistemology, and much much more.

We read the Oxford edition with notes and introduction by Juliette Atkinson. For an excellent discussion of how Silas Marner critiques materialist/financial forms of value, see Mary Poovey’s influential Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. And for a landmark study of how the English novel was shaped by -- and critiqued -- the emergence of the capitalist market, as always, we recommend Deidre Shauna Lynch’s The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning.

*Note to our listeners -- Megan is off this episode. She’ll be back next week.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.