Reading Groups

The Great Gatsby at 100 with Kristopher Jansma

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4 sessions Mondays, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT October 6 to November 17, 2025

Online via Zoom

The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at an additional 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
10/6, 10/20, 11/3, 11/17
Online via Zoom

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic 1925 novel, is now in its 100th year of publication. In this course, we’ll take a fresh look at this enduring story, with a focus on how the novel went from good to “great” with the help of Fitzgerald’s editor Max Perkins, critic and friend Edmund Wilson, and his wife Zelda. What was cut, what was added, and why does the book still mean so much to readers today?

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Jesmyn Ward’s introduction and the first three chapters of the novel.

What to expect from this reading group: This course will be primarily discussion-based, with prompt questions and brief analytic and historical notes.

Reading List:

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Author’s Edition), featuring an introduction by Jesmyn Ward

Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

Led by

Kristopher Jansma

Kristopher Jansma

Kristopher Jansma is the author of Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers, and the novels Our Narrow Hiding Places, Why We Came to the City, and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards. He is the winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the recipient of an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His short fiction, distinguished in The Best American Short Stories 2016, has been published in the Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Story, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. Kristopher is an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at SUNY New Paltz College.

Photo Credit: Michael Levy

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

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