A friend sent me the text of a recent WSJ editorial entitled “Will This Crisis Produce a ‘Gatsby’?� I’ll link to it later—for now I want to recreate my bad-faith reading experience in all its glory.  My first reaction was to the title, even though I know authors never write their own ti...

(Because the number of people who will understand the references to modernism and baseball number in the high single digits.) The prototypical leadoff hitter should radiate self-importance.  He has one job and one job only: to get on base.  He has one style and one style only: ostentatious scrappi...

The golden couple of the Jazz Age, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald looked great from a distance. But zoom in closer and the cracks began to show. She was a schizophrenic and he was an alcoholic. Their story will be told in the film The Beautiful and the Damned with director John Curran, The Painted Ve...

Yesterday, the day I saw "The Curious Life of Benjamin Button" and wrote that post, I conked out early. Oh, I don't know if it was from the movie or from the pizza and one glass of wine I had afterward or just from being somewhat old. Most of the people in the movie audience were old, so old, that w...

F. Scott Fitzgerald is becoming Hollywood’s hottest commodity. His short story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” has been turned into an award season heavyweight, and now Baz Luhrmann is set to bring Fitzgerald’s most famous work back to the screen again. In an attempt ...

According to Nikki Finke, Moulin Rouge and Romeo and Juliet director Baz Luhrmann (we’ll pretend Australia never happened) has signed on to helm a big screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby . I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never read F. Scott’s ...

By Jillian Karger Can Baz take on F. Scott? For his latest film project, "Australia" director Baz Luhrmann looked back sixty years and across an ocean. With his next project, he could be keeping it here in the U.S. -- and looking back even further. As we began noting last week, the director was tell...

Writing a book is one thing.  Finding a good title for it is another.  This can often take several attempts before the author gets it right and even then it can still be far from settled. Since the title (and cover design) of a book are considered marketing decisions rather than artistic o...

B arbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, asked Vice President Cheney on Nov. 1 for documents on the White House's reported watering down of testimony by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about global warming's harmful effec......

If you’re at all like me, you’re exceedingly excited about David Fincher’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (with Tilda Swinton, Cate Blanchett, and Brad Pitt, and in theatres this Xmas). Also if you’re at...