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Vampires, Muppets and prequels: The Great Gatsby’s new life out of copyright

The Great Gatsby is out of US copyright and fans of Fitzgerald’s novel have rushed to pay tribute with new books and fanfiction. What does it mean for the novel’s legacy?

On 2 January this year, the day after The Great Gatsby entered the US public domain, The Great Gatsby Undead was self-published on Amazon. Like F Scott Fitzgerald’s hallowed novel, it is narrated by Nick Carraway, but in this version, according to the promotional blurb, “Gatsby doesn’t seem to eat anything, and has an aversion to silver, garlic, and the sun”. Gatsby, you see, is a vampire.

More than 25m copies of The Great Gatsby have been sold since it was first published in 1925, and the expiration of copyright, 95 years after it was released, opens the door to anything and everything fans might want to do with it. The start of the year also brought the release of The Gay Gatsby (“Everyone’s got something to hide, but the secrets come out at Gaylord Gatsby’s parties – the gayest affairs West Egg ever had…”), and Jay the Great, a “modern retelling” of the story. On the fan fiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3), someone has uploaded a version of the novel that search-and-replaces Gatsby with Gritty, the name of the furry mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers ice hockey team. As one Twitter wit put it: “The Great Gatsby’s out of copyright? Sounds like we’ve been given the green light.”

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Mfw19l

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