A Virtual Conversation with Nghi Vo and Anna-Marie McLemore
Thursday, March 7, 2024
5:30pm – 6:30pm
Lecture Hall
More/register here.
As part of the 2024 Winter Read of The Great Gatsby, join us for a virtual conversation with authors Nghi Vo and Anna-Marie McLemore, whose novels retell F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic through new lenses. Vo and McLemore will join us over Zoom, but all are welcome to join us in the Library’s John A. and Carole O. Moran Lecture Hall, or over Vimeo. Livestream link forthcoming.
Nghi Vo’s debut novel, The Chosen and the Beautiful, reinvents Fitzgerald’s classic as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess, and introduces a major new literary voice. In Vo’s telling, Jordan Baker is our narrator. Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society—she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her. But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how. Vo’s novel was listed as a Most Anticipated in 2021 Pick for Oprah Magazine and a Best of Summer Pick for TIME Magazine.
Anna-Marie McLemore, a Stonewall Honor recipient and two-time National Book Award Longlist selectee, weaves an intoxicating tale of glamor and heartache in Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix, part of the Remixed Classics series. Her novel centers on Nicolás Caraveo, a 17-year-old transgender boy from Wisconsin, who has no interest in the city’s glamor. Going to New York is all about establishing himself as a young professional, which could set up his future—and his life as a man—and benefit his family. Nick rents a small house in West Egg from his 18-year-old cousin, Daisy Fabrega, who lives in fashionable East Egg near her wealthy fiancé, Tom—and Nick is shocked to find that his cousin now goes by Daisy Fay, has erased all signs of her Latine heritage, and now passes seamlessly as white. Nick’s neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious young man named Jay Gatsby, whose castle-like mansion is the stage for parties so extravagant that they both dazzle and terrify Nick. At one of these parties, Nick learns that the spectacle is all meant to impress a girl from Jay’s past—Daisy. And he learns something else: Jay is also transgender. As Nick is pulled deeper into the glittery culture of decadence, he spends more time with Jay, aiming to help his new friend reconnect with his lost love. But Nick’s feelings grow more complicated when he finds himself falling hard for Jay’s openness, idealism, and unfounded faith in the American Dream. McLemore’s novel was longlisted for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature.
Nghi Vo is the author of the novels Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful, as well as the acclaimed novellas Mammoths at the Gates, Into the Riverlands, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, and The Empress of Salt and Fortune, a Locus and Ignyte Award finalist and the winner of the Crawford Award and the Hugo Award. Born in Illinois, she now lives on the shores of Lake Michigan. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind.
Anna-Marie McLemore (they/them) is the author of William C. Morris Debut Award Finalist The Weight of Feathers; Wild Beauty; Blanca & Roja, one of Time Magazine’s 100 Best Fantasy Novels of All Time; Indie Next List title Dark and Deepest Red; Lakelore; and National Book Award longlist selections When the Moon Was Ours, which was also a Stonewall Honor Book; The Mirror Season; and Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix. Their latest release is Venom & Vow, co-authored with Elliott McLemore, and their next novel is Flawless Girls, forthcoming in May 2024.
