with Michael Farris Smith. Putting the Nick into Gatsby.

First broadcast 20 May 2021

Michael Farris Smith’s novels⁠ have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire and with NPR, among many others, and he’s also been a finalist for the Southern Book Prize and the Gold Dagger Award. His essays have appeared in the New York Times. Michael’s latest novel is called Nick, and it tells the story of Nick Carraway, narrator of the Great Gatsby, before we meet him in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic work which was first published in 1925.

Michael has appeared on ⁠BBC Radio 4’s Front Row to discuss Nick⁠, and the novel also been reviewed in the ⁠Guardian⁠ and the ⁠Times⁠. In the US it’s been reviewed in the ⁠New York Times⁠, the ⁠Washington Post⁠, the LA Times and elsewhere.

We talk about why and how Michael approached Nick as an unfinished character – as someone who we don’t learn that much about in The Great Gatsby – and what it was like having to wait for the copyright on Gatsby to expire before Nick could be published.