New editions of classic ‘Gatsby’

If you’ve been planning to read — or reread — “The Great Gatsby,” your biggest challenge now might be deciding on which edition.

Every Jan. 1, books, songs, movies and other copyrighted works more than 95 years old enter the public domain.

This year, that includes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, first published in 1925, as well as the Virginia Woolf novel “Mrs. Dalloway.”

Scribner, which had held the rights to “Gatsby” since it first appeared, reissued the novel in 2018 with a new introduction by two-time National

Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.

Now, in addition, readers can choose versions with introductions by John Grisham (Vintage Classics), Min Jin Lee (Penguin Classics), Malcolm Bradbury (Everyman’s Library) and Wesley Morris, a critic-at-large for the New York Times (Modern Library).

In March, Norton Critical Editions will publish the novel with an introduction and annotations by Harvard scholar David J. Alworth.

Four of those editions are issued by imprints at one publisher, Penguin Random House.

Tom Perry, publisher of Modern Library, said that some decisions about what to bring under his division’s umbrella, like “The Great Gatsby,” are easier than others.

“Deciding to publish ‘Gatsby’ or ‘A Passage to India’ didn’t require a lot of mulling over,” he said. “While we are spending more time trying to expand the current classics canon by finding more overlooked books and underpublished voices, like the poetry of Chika Sagawa or ‘There Is Confusion,’

by Jessie Redmon Fauset, to not publish these 20th-century classics when they become available would be like not putting ‘Moby-Dick’ on the 19th-century shelf.”

“Gatsby” is often cited as a — if not the — great American novel, and the new editions allow for fresh analysis, nearly a century later, of what our ideas of “American” now entail.

Morris, who received the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2012, parses the book’s themes using references to blackface, industrialization, “capitalism as an emotion,” silent films, reality television and, uniting these strands, what it means to “perform versions of oneself.”