The Last Green Light

The Great Gatsby is known for the glitz and glamour of Gilded Age plutocrats; in The Last Green Light, the working people of Fitzgerald’s novel get to tell their own, beautifully textured tale. Meet Jon Laine, a Midwesterner who captains one of the rumrunning boats that are the source of Gatsby’s great wealth; enter a colorful netherworld of diner cooks, dump scavengers, secretaries, deckhands and car mechanics caught in the increasingly deadly conflict between organized crime syndicates, amid the murderous passions of caste-busting love. From movie stars to dark freighters, Wobblies to Harlem nightclubs The Last Green Light, like a jazz improvisation, riffs on a great American novel, creating its own, unique world in the process.

George Michelsen Foy is the author of thirteen novels. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Ep;phany Journal, Washington Square Review, Monkey Bicycle, Apeiron, Notre Dame Review, American Literary Review, and other journals; and his long-form non-fiction has been published in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, and Slate. Of his novel To Sleep with Ghosts (Bantam / Doubleday), Nobel prize-winner Doris Lessing wrote, ＂[Foy is] a storyteller who, like Conrad, can compress into a tale you can’t put down all the complexities of a time and place.＂ His non-fiction books include Run the Storm (Scribner / Simon & Schuster, 2018) and Finding North: How navigation makes us human (Flatiron / Macmillan, 2016). GM Foy was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, and has won a Joe Gouveia Poetry Prize as well as awards in Ep;phany Journal’s, Foreword ’s, Fiction Factory’s and Cutthroat Journal’s short-story contests. Foy lives in southeastern New England and Brooklyn and teaches writing at NYU. At various times in a checkered career he was smuggled into Afghanistan with a rebel patrol and witnessed bombing raids on guerrilla camps in Central Africa; he also worked as a factory-hand, agricultural laborer, commercial fisherman, watchkeeping officer on British tramp freighters, and as chief cream-pastry transporter for a cakes factory in West London.