The Great Gatsby “Chapter 8” Well, we finally got the flashback we wanted—or thought we wanted—as well as a rather pedestrian double homicide that we weren’t even allowed to witness. (Those of you who predicted in last week’s comments that we’d get the rumored Gatsby death tonight can congratulate yourselves; I thought Fitzgerald would be […]
Books
As I mentioned in my Slate article about Leonard Nimoy, “The stacks of Star Trek paperbacks we all bought…had glorious oil paintings on their covers that depicted the Trek universe with baroque realism that far surpassed the cheap effects of the show.” Probably the best example from the early-to-mid-’Seventies (Star Trek’s “decade in the wilderness,” […]
In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle was done with Sherlock Holmes, the literary “consulting detective” he had created in 1886, whose appearances in two novels and 23 short stories had made Doyle wealthy and famous (and who is generally considered to be the most popular fictional character in history) but whose formulaic adventures had become tiresome […]