Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.QUESTION How do you arrange to skip town?ANSWER You accept them all.What...

After the death of her beloved twin brother and the abandonment of her long-time lover, Greta Wells undergoes electroshock therapy. Over the course of the treatment, Greta finds herself repeatedly sent to 1918, 1941, and back to the present. In 1941 she is a devoted mother; in 1918, she is a bohemian adulteress. Separated by time and social mores, Greta's lives are achingly similar, fraught with familiar tensions and difficult choices. What will happen...

It is 1953 and Pearlie, a dutiful housewife, finds herself living in the Sunset District of San Francisco, caring not only for her husband's fragile health but also for her son, who is afflicted with polio. Then, one Saturday morning, a stranger appears on her doorstep and everything changes. All the certainties by which Pearlie has lived are thrown into doubt. Does she know her husband at all? And what does the stranger want in return or his offer...

For Arthur Less, life is going surprisingly well: he is a moderately accomplished novelist in a steady relationship with his partner, Freddy Pelu. But nothing lasts: the death of an old lover and a sudden financial crisis has Less running away from his problems yet again as he accepts a series of literary gigs that send him on a zigzagging adventure across the US. Less roves across the “Mild Mild West,” through the South and to his mid-Atlantic...

Readings of excerpts from and critical analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The great Gatsby, a novel about the decadence and excess of the Jazz Age told through the story of self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby.