BLOGS: 5 Gatsby Resources & "The Great Gatsby and Literature’s Temporal Relativity"

[Ryan Goble]

Again these two resources are from the BookRiot blog. First an interesting little essay with a title way more complex sounding than its content "The Great Gatsby and Literature’s Temporal Relativity" Excerpt:

One of the many challenges for contemporary literary fiction is the staggering amount of really good competition. I don’t mean competition from Angry Birds, young adult literature, YouTube, film, comics, and social media. I mean the competition from all literature that has ever existed. If you are writing a novel about contemporary America, like, say, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding or Jamie Attenberg’s The Middlesteins, you are not competing with other new novels, but all novels.

Other art forms don’t really have this problem. The Dark Knight Rises isn’t competing with Kramer v. Kramer and Citizen Kane at the box office. At some point, it’ll be on DVD and Netflix too, but it gets a window to itself, or at least to share with only a dozen other first-run movies.

With novels, every new novel shares physical and digital space with all extant novels. Writing a courtship story? You are up against Austen, Bronte, Wharton, Henry James, and the like. How about science fiction? Somehow you’ve got to hope your reader has already read or doesn’t care about Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Le Guin.

And then this post Five GREAT GATSBY Resources That Are Better Than Cliffs Notes loads you up with fun YouTube clips. You can read their little intros at the blog - videos are simply embedded below for those daring enough to watch sans set ups...

[Melissa LynnPomerantz]

Thanks for all the great links! Can't wait for fall! Or, well, can't wait to use all of this great stuff.

[Ryan Goble]

You should know the response was an early morning LOL for me :) Yes, not fall but ... priceless...