Hot damn, dear reader!  One hundred years ago today, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was published, unleashing a literary bombshell that would come to define the Jazz Age and cement its place as one of the greatest American novels. Fitzgerald, a 28-year-old writer who’d already tasted fame with This Side of Paradise, poured his heart and disillusionment into this tale of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire chasing the hollow American Dream through glitz, obsession, and heartbreak. Set on Long Island, the book skewers the excesses of the Roaring Twenties—think lavish parties, bootleg liquor, and the empty promises of wealth—while exposing the rot beneath the glamour. With its razor-sharp prose and haunting themes of class, love, and betrayal, Gatsby not only capture an era; it predicted its collapse, hitting shelves just four years before the 1929 stock market crash.

What makes this literary moment so badass is how Fitzgerald took a sledgehammer to the myth of upward mobility, showing the American Dream as a rigged game where dreamers like Gatsby get crushed. The book flopped commercially at first—selling fewer than 20,000 copies in its initial run—but its unflinching honesty and lyrical grit later earned it a spot in the literary canon. Fitzgerald’s own life mirrored Gatsby’s, full of excess and tragedy, which only adds to the book’s raw power. On April 10, 1925, a novel was born that still burns with relevance, forcing us to face the cost of chasing illusions in a world that doesn’t care.

In book news more closer to home, I have been barely keeping up with Mgmt’s audacious schedule, but just barely.  There is minimal wiggle room in the schedule, so I can’t really allow for any “off days,” like when I only got 2 hours sleep the night before, or I have to spend most of the day dealing with some huge non-writing emergent issue.  I do like daily routines, but I’m having to write early in the morning and/or into the night, so my old daily routine is just getting shot to hell.  One side effect to not having weekends is that I now, suddenly, have no idea what day of the week it is.

Anyway, I’m babbling…I need to get back to work.

N.P.: “Dangerous” – Royal Deluxe