Mini-Literature Course: Fitzgerald's Winter Dreams

Backstory Bookshop just opened its third place — The Studio — which offers courses and workshops for readers, writers, and curious minds. One of the courses is a led by Nancy Goldstein, PhD — who will bring classic texts to life in a whole new way! (You can find more about her programming here.) As part of this, we're offering a FREE single-session "taster" on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Winter Dreams at the bookshop. We'll be discussing Winter Dreams (1922), one of Fitzgerald's most admired short stories — and, as he himself acknowledged, a first sketch for the novel that would become The Great Gatsby. Dexter Green, a caddie at a Minnesota golf club, falls for Judy Jones, a rich, careless, luminously beautiful girl who will occupy his imagination for the next decade. He will go on to build a small fortune of his own. What follows is a story about desire so precisely observed it is almost clinical: the way a certain kind of longing attaches not to a person but to everything that person appears to represent. Or rather, everything she once represented. Winter Dreams turns on a moment of loss so quiet you could miss it — and then can't stop thinking about it. Fitzgerald understood, a full three years before Gatsby, that the green light at the end of the dock is not really about the girl. More information can be found here: https://www.backstorybookshop.com/event-details-registration/discussion-of-f-scott-fitzgeralds-winter-dreams. And you can find out more about programming at The Studio here!