Christopher Hitchens Marking Up Gatsby

There’s something oddly comforting about the Vanity Fair website acting as some de facto Christopher Hitchens museum with the archive they have set up.  And while we’ve probably had our fill of Gatsby-related SEO posts, Hitch’s handwritten notes in his copy of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece make us kinda happy. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, our Tumblr, and sign up for our mailing list.  

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The Old Oxford: Downton Abbey, Gatsby, Don Draper, and Costuming Drama

There was this one shot from the premiere of the third season of Downton Abbey that has really been sticking with me. It wasn’t the epic moment when the Dowager Countess and Shirley MacLaine shared their first scene together, anything having to do with Bates in prison, or Lady Mary throwing a fit when Matthew decided he wanted to be the latest of the show’s martyrs and not accept a windfall of cash that he inherited (days before their wedding, no less). […]

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Morning Bites: A Real Gatsby, Steinbeck in Vietnam, Russians, PEN Picks, and More

“All I could think of upon hearing this was that vibrating moment when the young Jay Gatz, not yet Gatsby, sees his future arrive in the guise of a yacht dropping anchor on Lake Superior.” – The real life of Alan Feuer in the New York Times. John Steinbeck’s dispatches from the Vietnam War. Book Boroughing has their picks for the PEN World Voices Festival. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky do battle for the hearts of readers. Macmillan and Penguin standing their […]

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Happy Birthday to The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was first published by Charles Scribner’s Sons on this day in 1925.  We were trying to think of something to say about the book that hasn’t been said already, but nothing came to mind. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, Google + and our Tumblr.  

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Jay Gatsby Would be Pissed

Posted by Jason Diamond The 25-room Colonial Revival mansion built in 1902 on Long Island’s Gold Coast and  thought to be the inspiration behind a F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, has been turned into a pile of rubble so a bunch of McMansions could be built where it once stood. I hope the ghost of Daisy Buchanan haunts the people who end up moving there.

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