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Book Reviewed by:From award-winning author Nghi Vo comes Don't Sleep with the Dead, a standalone companion novella to The Chosen and the Beautiful, her acclaimed reimagining of The Great Gatsby.
Nick Carraway―paper soldier and novelist―has found a life and a living watching the mad magical spectacle of New York high society in the late thirties. He's good at watching, and he's even better at pretending: pretending to be straight, pretending to be human, pretending he's forgotten the events of that summer in 1922.
On the eve of the second World War, however, Nick learns that someone's been watching him pretend and that memory goes both ways. When he sees a familiar face at a club one night, it quickly becomes clear that dead or not, damned or not, Jay Gatsby isn't done with him.
In all paper there is memory, and Nick's ghost has come home.
CHAPTER ONE
The good thing—the only good thing—about the worst finally happening is that it has happened.
That was something the first sergeant said on the morning before the final push for Cantigny, when the sun unexpectedly rose up silver instead of gold. It was a bad omen—before the day was over, the worst came, and many men I knew did not survive it. With the situation in Europe, I found myself thinking more and more about the war, and what I came up with twenty years later and sometime after three in the morning on the edge of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, was that the first sergeant had lied.
The worst had happened, and there was nothing good about it.
The police herded us into a blind alley at the head of Tenth Street, apartments on one side and a tailor's shop on the other. It was only blank walls that faced the alley, and with the rear blocked off by a chain-link fence and the alley's mouth guarded by a pair of policemen with ...
There are also people who swap faces, hearts ripped out and replaced by paper surrogates, demons, Agents of Hell, etc. The result is confusing and underdeveloped: the book aims for a unique world, but lacks the worldbuilding necessary to fully support it. Nghi Vo counters this shortcoming with fully controlled prose. Her sentences are balanced and precise, and with elegant pacing she manages to convey the emotional states of her characters, especially the narrator, with well-executed moments of beauty and emotional intensity. Don't Sleep with the Dead is ambitious and sometimes beautiful, an interesting choice for fans of fantasy and queer fiction, but ultimately uneven. It tries to channel the spirit of The Great Gatsby while building something entirely new, and in the process it loses clarity and cohesion...continued
Full Review
(720 words)
(Reviewed by Alicia Calvo Hernández).
In 1925, a few months after the publication of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald received a letter from T.S. Eliot in which the poet—already renowned for The Waste Land—described the novel as "the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James." Fitzgerald received the praise with enthusiasm, especially since Eliot's was one of the few favorable opinions in that first year of publication, and in those that followed until Fitzgerald's death in 1940.
Although Fitzgerald did not hesitate to call it "the best American novel ever written" in a letter to his publisher, The Great Gatsby enjoyed neither commercial success nor great critical acclaim during his lifetime. Its second printing never sold out.
But by ...
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