Join us for the grand finale of the 2024 Winter Read of "The Great Gatsby." We'll party like it's 1924! Come dressed in your best 1920s garb (if you have it), and enjoy music, snacks, and historic photos of the Wood River Valley from the 1920s and inspired by the book’s many great parties. Test your Gatsby knowledge with trivia designed by our Winter Read teen interns and be entered to win great prizes! All are welcome, and dressing up is completely optional. We hope you’ll join us as we close out this year’s community read—celebrating reading a story together!

For more than a decade Cheryl Strayed has written the popular “Dear Sugar” advice column, which has been collected in her bestselling book "Tiny Beautiful Things" that was recently adapted for an Emmy-nominated Hulu television show. In this talk, Cheryl will share stories about everything she’s learned about the art of writing advice—and indeed, writing honestly in all of her work—about the wildly human and universal experiences that connect us all. Cheryl will also take questions from the audience and sign books afterwards. Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller "Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail," which was made into an Oscar-nominated film. Her bestselling collection of Dear Sugar columns, "Tiny Beautiful Things," was adapted for a Hulu television show and as a play that continues to be staged in theaters nationwide. Strayed's other books are the critically acclaimed novel, "Torch," and the bestselling collection "Brave Enough," which brings together more than one hundred of her inspiring quotes. Her award-winning essays and short stories have been published in The Best American Essays, the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, and elsewhere. Strayed has also made two hit podcasts, Dear ...

As part of the 2024 Winter Read of "The Great Gatsby," join us for a virtual conversation with authors Nghi Vo and Anna-Marie McLemore, whose novels retell F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic through new lenses. Vo and McLemore will join us over Zoom, but all are welcome to join us in the Library's John A. and Carole O. Moran Lecture Hall. Nghi Vo’s debut novel, "The Chosen and the Beautiful," reinvents Fitzgerald's classic as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess. In Vo's telling, Jordan Baker is our narrator. Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society—she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her. But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how. Vo's novel was listed as a Most Anticipated in 2021 Pick for ...