New Release: The Great Gatsby Anthology

The month of June marks the 4th anniversary of Silver Birch Press — and the 3rd anniversary of our blog. Our first post on June 24, 2012 featured F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby — so it seems fitting to celebrate these milestones with our latest release: The Great Gatsby Anthology, a collection of poetry and prose inspired by The Great Gatsby. This is a unique collection of material that has NOT appeared on our blog. 

We issued a call for submissions on March 15, 2014 and received submissions of poetry and prose from people around the world. Over a year in the making, the collection features writing from 80 established and up-and-coming authors :

Katie Aliferis
E. Kristin Anderson
M. Ivana Trevisani Bach
Johannes S.H. Bjerg
Julie E. Bloemeke
Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier
Ed Bremson
Tanya Bryan
Ana Maria Caballero
Sam Cha
Jan Chronister
Maryann Corbett
Anthony Costello
Tasha Cotter
Helen Dallas
Tracy Davidson
Susan de Sola
Andrea Janelle Dickens
Michelle Donfrio
Jennifer Finstrom
Ashley Ford
Jeannine Hall Gailey
Shivapriya Ganapathy
Marielle Gauthier
Trina Gaynon
Gary Glauber
Douglas Goetsch
Lois Marie Harrod
Senna Heyatawin
Joanie Hieger Fritz Zosike
Shawn P. Hosking
Veronica Hosking
Mathias Jansson
Jen Cullerton Johnson
David M. Katz
Becca Klaver
Laurie Kolp
Linda Kraus
Jean L. Kreiling
Kathryn Kulpa
David W. Landrum
Samantha LeVan
Stefanie Lipsey
Caolan Madden
Shahé Mankerian
Marjorie Manwaring
John McCarthy
Catfish McDaris
George McKim
Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Christina Murphy
Leslie Nichols
Lewis Oakwood
Alysson B. Parker
Martha Patterson
James Penha,
David S. Pointer,
Christina M. Rau
Suzanne Rawlinson
Patrick T. Reardon
Marybeth Rua-Larsen
Shloka Shankar
Sheikha A.
Edward W.L. Smith
Matthew Oldham Smith
Sherry Steiner
Christine Stroud
Marianne Titiriga
Sally Toner
Lee Upton
Sylvia Riojas Vaughn
Melanie Villines
Rachel Voss
Alan Walowitz
Amy Schreibman Walter
Susannah White
Lin Whitehouse
Neal Whitman
Scott Wiggerman
Matthew Wilson
Theodora Ziolkowski

The Great Gatsby Anthology is available in paperback at Amazon.com — with a Kindle version coming soon.

The Great Gatsby Last Line Haiku by F. Scott Fitzgerald

THE GREAT GATSBY LAST LINE HAIKU
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

So we beat on,
boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly
into the past.

PHOTO: Jewelry-lovers can wear the last line of The Great Gatsby in a stunning brass cuff, available from Jezebel Charms, a British site that offers “charming literary creations.”

Before and After, The Great Gatsby Anthology poem by Katie Aliferis

Before and After
by Katie Aliferis 

Long after the glitter has settled
Long after the gowns have ceased flowing
Long after the bubbles have popped in their glasses

Your heart still jumps at the click of heels on the
Marble floors, at the tone of a light giggle
At the mention of her name

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Katie Aliferis is a writer from San Francisco, California. Her poetry has been featured in Voices of Hellenism Project: Voices, 9 Muses News, Velvet Revolution Reading Series, and other literary journals and websites. When not writing, Katie can be found reading, traveling, and enjoying time with her friends and family. Follow Katie on Twitter: @KatieA_SF and visit her website KatieAliferis.com.

Illustration: Portrait of Daisy Buchanan (watercolor, 2011) by Hannah Haeun Kim, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

SOURCE: “Before and After” by Katie Aliferis will appear in the Silver Birch Press The Great Gatsby Anthology (April 2015).

Great Gatsby Halloween

A Boston-based costume website advises would-be customers to “Capture the Great Gatsby Era.” While revelers in other cities are dressing up as ghouls, zombies, witches, and Honey Boo Boo, Bostonians are celebrating Halloween by dressing as Jay Gatsby, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker, and Nick Carraway. Très elegant…

Summer Solstice, quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Daisy Buchanan: “Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it.” F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby

Illustration: Portrait of Daisy Buchanan (watercolor, 2011) by Hannah Haeun Kim, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Our First Post: June 24, 2012

Since we’re honoring THE GREAT GATSBY these days, let’s revisit the post that started it all — our first post from June 24, 2012…

To me, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the quintessential summer book. It chronicles the hot months of 1922, when the Great War was over and the Great Depression was yet to come. The 1920s were a blissful time when possibilities seemed limitless — and everyone seemed to be having fun (despite, or perhaps because of, Prohibition). These were the years when the cocktail was borne (to make the booze go farther), when women bobbed their hair and danced with abandon. It was The Jazz Age, as Fitzgerald called it — a name that stuck.

Every time I pick up The Great Gatsby –– and I’ve read the book perhaps a dozen times — I am drawn in and enraptured by the book’s poetry and romance. To quote the song Kiplinger plays: In the morning, In the evening, ain’t we got fun. Yes, Gatsby is great fun — even with its sad ending. The story seems fresh and real, even though it took place 90 years ago…

We all have a Gatsby in us — a hopeless romantic, an impossible dreamer who tries to hang onto the inner spark that makes life worth living. So pour yourself a lemonade (or something stronger), plop yourself in a lawn chaise, and dive into the greatest novel of all time. Happy Summer!

IL GRANDE GATSBY, Italian translation by Fernanda Pivano

IL GRANDE GATSBY
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Italian Translation 
by Fernanda Pivano

Opening lines in Italian:
Negli anni più vulnerabili della giovinezza, mio padre mi diede un consiglio che no mi

è mai più uscito di mente.

— Quando ti vien la voglia di criticare qualcuno — mi disse — ricordati che non tutti a questo mondo hanno avuto i vantaggi che hai avuto tu. 

In Inglese: 
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” 

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR, from Wikipedia: 

Fernanda Pivano (1917- 2009) was an Italian writer, journalist, translator and critic. Born in Genoa, as a teenager she moved with her family to Turin where she attended the Massimo D’Azeglio Lyceum. In 1941 she received a bachelor’s degree with a thesis on Herman Melville‘s Moby-Dick, which earned her a prize from the Center for American Studies in Rome. Her first translation, part of the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, was published in 1943, the same year she received a degree in philosophy.

In 1948, Pivano met Ernest Hemingway, resulting in an intense relationship of professional collaboration and friendship. The following year, Mondadori published her translation of A Farewell to Arms.

Throughout her professional life, Pivano contributed to the publication in Italy of significant American writers, from the icons of the Roaring Twenties, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and William Faulkner, through the writers of the 1960s (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti), to young writers of recent decades, including Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace, Chuck Palahniuk and Jonathan Safran Foer. Pivano was also interested in African-American culture and published many Italian versions of Richard Wright‘s books. In 1980 and again in 1984, Pivano interviewed Charles Bukowski at his home in San Pedro, California. These interviews became the basis for her book, Charles Bukowski, Laughing with the Gods first published in the USA by Sun Dog Press in 2000.

Photo: Ernest Hemingway and Fernanda Pivano, 1949.

Gatsby Erasure Poem by james (w) moore

THE GREAT GATSBY
CHAPTER 5 ERASURE POEM
by james moore

I was
a house on fire
the peninsula blazing with
thin glints Turning
it was lit
it was wild
all the sound
blew the wires and made the lights go
he winked
toward me
like the World’s Fair,
eyes absent.
to some,
too late.
we take a plunge
all
 
All
 
I said
“I don’t want to put you to
any trouble.”
“I don’t want
to put you to any trouble, you see.”
the day     to-morrow         a moment
with reluctance:
 
We both looked
ragged ended and darker

Copyright james moore, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Visit james moore, the self-described writer/director/actor/designer guy at his blog (jameswmoore.wordpress.com). His note on the above erasure poem reads, “if Baz Luhrmann can remix The Great Gatsby, then so can we.”

james moore was one of 85 official remixers in Pulitzer Remix, a 2013 National Poetry Month initiative to create found poetry from the 85 Pulitzer Prize-winning works of fiction. Each poet posted one poem per day on the Pulitzer Remix website during the month of April, resulting in the creation of more than 2,500 poems by the project’s conclusion.

According to the Pulitzer Remix website:
Pulitzer Remix is sponsored by the Found Poetry Review, a literary journal dedicated exclusively to publishing found poetry. Found poems are the literary equivalents of collages, where words, phrases and lines from existing texts are refashioned into new poems. The genre includes centos*, erasure poetry, cut-up poetry, and other textual combinations.

Pulitzer Remix poets are challenged to create new works of poetry that vary in topic and theme from the original text, rather than merely regurgitating the novels in poetic form.

*Cento: A work of poetry  composed of verses or passages taken from other authors, placed  in a new form or order.

The Great Gatsby, Swedish Style

We continue our tribute to The Great Gatsby — our favorite novel and the reason we started this blog in June 2012 — with the cover from a Swedish edition of the book. In Sweden, F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s novel is called En Man Utan Skrupler, which translates as A Man Without Scruples.

I’m guessing that people in Sweden like to know something about a book before deciding to read it — and, I’ll admit, The Great Gatsby isn’t a descriptive title like, say, the Swedish blockbuster The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Set in 1922, The Great Gatsby tells the story of post-WWI America, the Roaring Twenties, when Prohibition —  a national ban on the sale, production, and transportation of alcohol, in effect from 1920-1933 — was the law of the land,  setting the stage for gangsters, bootleggers, and other nefarious types who were ready, willing, and able to give the people what they wanted.

While Jay Gatsby made his money through the illegal sale and transportation of alcohol, I’ve never thought of him as “a man without scruples.” That’s the point of the novel, isn’t it?  In the end, it was Daisy and Tom — the rich — who really had no scruples.

I did a search for quotes about “scruples” and found the following, which speaks to to Gatsby’s approximate time and place.

“The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece.

Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization.

Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else – and this was a frequent solution – they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.”

MALCOLM COWLEY, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. 

El Gran Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

El Gran Gatsby (Opening lines in Spanish)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

En mi más temprana edad, alguna vez mi padre me dio un consejo que desde entonces hago dar vueltas en mi mente.

–Cuando sientas deseos de criticar a alguien — me dijo — recuerda tan sólo que no todos en el mundo tu vieron las ventajas que has tenido tú.

En Inglés: 
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” 

###

El Gran Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is available in many editions at Amazon’s Spanish site — with brisk sales for most versions (paperback, Kindle, and audiobook).