Gatsby, Dalloway enter public domain

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This article was published 16/01/2021 (2034 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The literary world is holding its breath waiting to see what’s going to happen now that American-published books from 1925 (and in the U.K., the works of George Orwell) have entered public domain.

Copyrighted creative works enter the public domain in the U.S. after 95 years, meaning they are free to copy, distribute or rework. That means one of the biggest years for 20th-century literature is now open.

Works from 1925 entering public domain include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s debut story collection In Our Time, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and lesser-known early works by Agatha Christie and Aldous Huxley.

In the United Kingdom, where the life of copyright is based on the year of the creator’s death plus 70 years, 2021 will see the works of George Orwell go into public domain. The Guardian notes that the expiration of copyright on Orwell’s work could result in the green light for projects like a proposed David Bowie musical based on Nineteen Eighty Four, an idea that the Orwell estate nixed in the 1970s.

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Within days of The Great Gatsby entering public domain, the much-talked-about prequel to the college-reading-list staple and Great American Novel candidate hit the shelves to mixed reviews, which is probably better than anybody suspected.

Nick, by well-regarded Southern gothic novelist Michael Farris Smith, creates a backstory for Nick Carraway, the mild-mannered narrator of The Great Gatsby. In Smith’s book, the reader follows Nick to the trenches of the First World War and to postwar, PTSD-affected encounters in Paris and New Orleans in the years before he rents a house next to a mysterious Long Island millionaire.

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Every other author trying to come up with a cool promotion for an upcoming book is just competing for second place. Nobody’s going to top Calgary writer/musician Glenn Dixon.

Dixon’s debut novel, Bootleg Stardust, is about a dreamer with a troubled past who lands a gig as the stand-in for the guitarist in a hit ’70s rock band called Downtown Exit.

So to create a book trailer Dixon, who plays in a Calgary bar band called the Barrel Dogs, rounded up some musician friends and created a real-life Downtown Exit, recording a soundtrack for the book on the Rolling Stones’ original mobile recording unit — the portable recording studio used for the Stones’ Exile on Main Street, Led Zeppelin III and Led Zeppelin IV as well as Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water. The unit is on display at Calgary’s Canadian Music Centre.

The novel, drawing comparisons to Daisy Jones and the Six and the works of Nick Hornby, comes out from Simon & Schuster in April.

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Winnipeg’s At Bay Press is offering a series of online events with a difference this winter in promoting the publishing house’s writers and artists.

The Better Book Club runs Mondays at 7 p.m. through Feb. 22, and will feature the poets, novelists and illustrators of recent At Bay offerings.

Registering for the online event doesn’t just allow participants to listen to readings and discussions or ask questions — At Bay Press will also send a free PDF of the book under discussion to everybody who registers online.

The next Better Book Club takes place Jan. 18, and features Dennis Cooley discussing his poetry collection The Muse Sings. Following that, sessions will feature Ontario mystery writer Brad Smith talking about his crime novel Goliath Run, Ontario poet Mary Barnes discussing her collection What Fox Knew, artist and filmmaker Robert Pasternak discussing his book Place Into Being, author Christopher Ducharme and artist Lisa Mendis discussing their post-punk graphic novel Curb Angels, and Winnipeg poet-novelist-editor Roger Léveillé discussing his book Ex Nihilo.

Previous book club events featured local poet-essayist Ariel Gordon (TreeTalk) and poet-playwright-fiction writer Karen Clavelle (The Mother Goose Letters).

To register for any of the sessions or for more information, see atbaypress.com/events.

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