Saturday, January 16, 2016, 2pm. Fort Wadsworth, Enter through the guard station on Bay Street near School Road, SINY 10305.  We’ll gather to read in the Visitors’ Center (ample free parking in the adjacent lot).

By popular demand, Staten Island OutLOUD has added another F. Scott Fitzgerald event: A reading of Fitzgerald’s haunting story “The Ice Palace”.  We’ll gather indoors, in the warm & comfy setting of the Visitors’ Center.  Then, weather permitting, we’ll head outside for a wintry walk around the old fort buildings, which may remind us of the mysterious structure of the Ice Palace.  Free.

“The Ice Palace”, one of Fitzgerald’s short stories published in Flappers and Philosophers in 1922, has been described as a modernist work.  It involves a young woman trapped between two worlds: her home in a sleepy town in Georgia, and the bustling Northern city where her fiance resides. In the dead of winter, she takes the northbound train to visit her fiance and his family.  They welcome her with warm hospitality and show her every courtesy.  Her young man is eager to introduce her to his home town’s festive winter carnival, which features a massive, magical ice palace, fashioned from the clearest ice.  She enjoys the spectacle, but when she enters the ice palace, something happens that nobody expected.  Their lives are forever changed.