Great works of art are great, in part, because they continue to have something to say to the present: They're both timebound and timeless. And, boy, does Gatsby have something to say to us in 2025.
Paradise lost? Maybe not. When was there an idyllic Times Square, exactly? The historic fantasy of the Great White Way as a glamorous montage of gleaming marquees, sparky backstage romances, and elegant audiences reveling in black tie was a Hollywood concoction, arguably false from the start. The movie that first spawned it, the 1933 Busby Berkeley musical 42nd Street, was, like the Broadway stage adaptation a half-century later, a laundered version of its source material, an eponymous 1932 roman à clef by Bradford Ropes. In the novel, Broadway’s backstage is presented as a sweatshop commanded by sadistic directors and illiterate, penny-pinching producers, many of them sexual predators, who drive the performers and backstage crew to exhaustion and, in one instance, death. The neighborhood they toil in is rowdy and often tough.
Did Times Square make a comeback after that? The advent of sound in Hollywood six years ahead of the Busby Berkeley 42nd Street had already triggered a Broadway decline, knocking the number of new productions down to 174 for the 1932–33 season from its peak of 264 in 1927–28, when The Jazz Singer supercharged talking pictures’ usurpation of the stage as the foremost medium of American mass entertainment. As television caught on in the 1950s, the erosion continued. By the early 1960s, a typical Broadway season would field on average 60 or so shows. Even decades before the pandemic, that number had fallen into the 30s.
Carlstrom’s debut has almost everything: comedy, action, adventure, philosophical musings, banter, alcoholism, crimes, weird cult-y things, and even some modicum of closure. And while the ending is abrupt, it’s also comforting, as well as oddly convincing given the sheer absurdity that precedes it.
Koethe’s new collection looks upward at the most distant galaxies and downward at the inarticulate dead, continuing the central quest of his poetic work, which is examining—between the certainty of death and the unknowability of the universe—the nature of human selfhood, shorn of superstition. As “someone whose only heaven is here,” the poet-philosopher has long preferred “axioms” to “angels” and is interested in how we answer our essential human questions with reason and imagination, apart from religious orthodoxy.
The literary appetite for motherhood narratives is bottomless these days, to judge by the feverish reception accompanying recent titles like Miranda July’s novel All Fours and Leslie Jamison’s memoir Splinters.
Chantal Braganza’s initial idea – to write a straightforward book of essays on “the culture of motherhood,” she says – would have fit neatly into this ever-expanding genre. Instead, Story of Your Mother is something looser in structure and harder to classify: an expansive hybrid of memoir and essay exploring identity, labour and care, which manages to be both intellectually rigorous and compulsively readable.