Category: Ernest Hemingway

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by Mark Athitakis, posted in Andrew Sean Greer, David Foster Wallace, Ernest Hemingway, Ha Jin, John Irving, Lynn Stegner, Mark Twain, Russell Rowland, Thomas Pynchon, Wallace Stegner

Virginia Quarterly Review looks back on its early history with Wallace Stegner, including some manuscript scans.

Speaking of: Stegner’s daughter-in-law, novelist Lynn Stegner, is working on an anthology about what it means to grow up in the West with another writer, Russell Rowland. You say you haven’t read anything by Rowland? Don’t be so sure.

Peter Osnos visits a Beijing bookstore and looks approvingly on the many Western books available to him. “The neuralgic issue of censorship is confined to a substantial but specific range of books both in Chinese and from abroad,” Osnos writes. He and Ha Jin need to have a chat.

Mark Twain‘s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, has announced that 2010 will be the “Year of Twain,” marking the centennial of his death and 175th birthday. A dedicated Web site will cover all the exciting events happening next year; for now, you’ll have to settle for the Oak Ridge Boys, who hit town August 22.

Litchfield, New Hampshire, is still squabbling over how to put what stories on its reading lists after parents pitched a fit over the likes of David Sedaris and Laura Lippman appearing in the curriculum. “The stories are not appropriate ‘for developing minds that are very impressionable,'” a parent tells the Nashua Telegraph. One can only imagine the impression that high-school students get from watching their parents wring their hands in public.

Elsewhere in New Hampshire, parents are concerned about John Irving‘s A Prayer for Owen Meany. So, maybe just be careful about bringing books into New Hampshire for a while.

“I see from this paper’s letters section that various well-meaning but clueless liberals are upset by my recent assertion that Ernest Hemingway was on the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War.”

Somebody posing as Jay Murray Siskind, a professor in Don DeLillo‘s White Noise, wrote an essay about David Foster Wallace for the journal Modernism/Modernity. The joke was so funny that pretty much nobody got it for five years.

Wired‘s interactive map to Thomas Pynchon‘s Los Angeles has gone global.

And Andrew Sean Greer figures you can stop asking him about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button any time now.

Links: Dirty Old Men

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo, Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, George Pelecanos, Jim Harrison, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, Ward Just

Playboy will publish an excerpt of Vladimir Nabokov‘s final work, an unfinished novella titled The Original of Laura. Don’t look so shocked: The magazine interviewed him in 1964.

Ernest Hemingway: KGB spy?

The Second Pass takes a look at ten books that need to be tossed out of the canon. First up, Don DeLillo‘s White Noise: “DeLillo sacrifices any sense of realism for dull, thin polemic.” I’m not buying the “polemic” bit, and who said he was shooting for realism anyhow?

The Iowa Review has a new editor.

Politico rings up Ward Just for a quote about the death of Robert McNamara.

Eudora Welty‘s estate pulled her name out of the running for the renaming of her alma mater, the Mississippi University for Women.

The Atlantic has a modest proposal: Give tax breaks to publishers who support new and little-known writers. M.A. Orthofer retorts, “don’t ‘not-for-profit’ publishers (many of the finest small publishers in the US) already get obscene tax breaks ?”

John Updike‘s longtime home in Beverly Farms, Mass., sold last month for $2.5 million.

Jim Harrison has a pretty fancy house too, though his actual writing room looks like a cubicle in an abandoned real-estate brokerage.

George Pelecanos doesn’t know jack about writing about shotguns, according to a Field & Stream gunblogger: “Pelecanos in particular will put characters in a tense armed standoff, then have someone say ‘I can shoot you before you have time to rack that pump.’ In real life the immediate reply would be ‘Boom.'”

Links: The “Intergalactically Challenging Jacket” and More

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Jennifer Weiner, Joseph O'Neill, Kaye Gibbons, Paul Theroux, T.C. Boyle, Toni Morrison

The summer issue of Lapham’s Quarterly is dedicated to travel, excerpting Paul Theroux‘s Dark Star Safari, Marilynne Robinson‘s Gilead, Tobias Wolff‘s This Boy’s Life, and Jack Kerouac‘s On the Road, among many other writers around the world and throughout history. The journal’s Web site features James Franco reading that Kerouac excerpt in an appropriately slackerish way. The most entertaining piece, though, not online, is a 1935 article from Pravda describing the despairing life of American cities, which are sad and largely empty of people. Contrary to popular belief in the Soviet Union, the authors write, in New York and Chicago “brokers don’t run down the sidewalks knocking over American citizens; they simmer, invisible to the public, in their stock exchanges, making all kinds of shady deals in those monumental buildings.” The West Coast is no better: It’s home to the “American film industry, which releases around a thousand well-made but egregiously tasteless and idiotically stupid films per year.”

Speaking of Theroux, he recalls hanging out at Michael Jackson‘s Neverland, and talking with the late pop star on the phone in the wee hours about, among other things, his reading habits: “‘Somerset Maugham,’ he said quickly, and then, pausing at each name: ‘Whitman. Hemingway. Twain.'”

Jennifer Weiner on studying under Toni Morrison: “Toni Morrison used to read her students’ work out loud, and hearing her read it made me believe that it was good (of course, Toni Morrison being Toni Morrison, she could have been reading my grocery list and I would have thought, ‘Genius!’ She’s one of the world’s all-time great readers).”

Edgar Allan Poe, supernatural detective.

The sad, long struggle of Kaye Gibbons.

Ernest Hemingway‘s grandson has reworked Papa’s posthumous memoir, A Moveable Feast, in a way that “attempts to give the impression of a work which is not completed but which is nevertheless readable.”

The second issue of Wag’s Revue is now online, with an interview with T.C. Boyle as its centerpiece. Excerpt: “I do not reveal much of myself, either publicly or in the work. I may have no problem wearing an intergalactically challenging jacket on TV and cracking jokes with the best of them or investing everything I have in a performance of a story, either live or recorded, but all of that is simply a way of rubbing up against the public world while all the while keeping the private world private.”

Joseph O’Neill ponders the president reading Netherland: “I suppose you flatter yourself that the story is the history of the United States. That’s the weird, disorienting feeling you get.”

And, apropos of nothing in particular except that anybody who follows the Washington Nationals badly needs a laugh, this is great.

Links: Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Sedaris, Don DeLillo, Ernest Hemingway, Ha Jin, Jim Thompson, John Updike, Russell Banks, Toni Morrison

John Callaway, longtime host of Chicago Tonight, the news program of the city’s PBS station, died this week. Among the videos on the tribute page is an interview with John Updike, circa Terrorist.

Jim Thompson discusses his path of going from bartending in Finland to publishing his new novel, Snow Angels

Austin-based hip-hop producer David Williams makes a valid point: “You know what’s a shame about calling your band The Airborne Toxic Event? If that band’s fans haven’t read Don DeLillo, they’re just gonna think, ‘Fart.'” Discussions of Saul Bellow and Walter Benjamin ensue.

On a related note, DeLillo’s next novel comes out next year.

Ha Jin discusses writing in English as his second language.

There’s something charming about the fact that one of the people leading the charge to preserve Ernest Hemingway‘s home in Cuba is Bob Vila.

A group of Ohio University students have made a film version of Russell Banks‘ 1981 collection of interlinked stories, Trailerpark.

Parents in Litchfield, New Hampshire, are outraged that stories by Stephen King, Laura Lippman, David Sedaris, and Ernest Hemingway are being taught in high school. The story ends with a hell of a kicker: “The parents objected to satirist Sedaris’ ‘I Like Guys’ because they do not want their children learning about homosexuality in school.”

Oh, and a couple of school-board members are still blowing a gasket over Song of Solomon in Shelby, Michigan.

Today in Papa

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Bill Hazelwood, Ernest Hemingway

On Monday about 3,000 letters, notes, and other papers of Ernest Hemingway will be released online by the Finca Vincia Foundation, which operates the writer’s former home in Cuba. No lost novels or short stories are in the cache; the biggest find, according to a London Times story, are coded memos of his work tracking German U-boats during World War II.

The story doesn’t note that the news marks the end of a long struggle to get the papers salvaged from the crumbling home. Efforts by researchers to help save the work have been stymied by the Bush administration; in 2004 representatives of the Finca Vincia Foundation (then the Hemingway Preservation Foundation) were denied visas in to Cuba, because, according to a State Department spokesperson, “We are interested in helping people preserve the informational material that was produced by Ernest Hemingway, but the house is a tourist attraction, and because permitting Americans to engage in a transaction that would preserve that house would have the effect of supporting the Cuban regime’s tourist infrastructure, it is not consistent with our policy to permit that to happen.”

A 2007 St. Petersburg Times story notes that conservationists were allowed in 2005 for the next two years, which wasn’t enough time for them to finish their work. No word about what finally allowed the work to wrap up, or what’s freed the papers to come to the United States next month. In February, the collection moves to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Perhaps at some point the papers will make a visit to the worthy, if somewhat bedraggled, Ernest Hemingway Museum in Oak Park, Ill., which is right next to his childhood home. Hemingway famously wrote off the Chicago suburb by calling it a town of “broad lawns and narrow minds,” but it’s worth a visit if you’re in the area, and the home is apparently still doing some literary support work. Novelist Bill Hazelgrove has been writing in the attic of the Hemingway home for the past decade. Here’s a video tour of his nook:

War Stories

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller, Robert Stone, Tim O'Brien, William Faulkner

At the Oxford University Press blog, Keith Gandal writes something of a, er, call to arms to academic critics to engage more deeply with the subject of literature and war. Gandal is a Northern Illinois University English professor who’s written The Pen and the Gun, which has a great thesis: “Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner were motivated, in their famous postwar novels, not by their experiences of the horrors of war but rather by their failure to have those experiences.”

Gandal figures he knows what’s created the dearth of war stories in academia:

We know why the subjects of war and the military have fallen out of favor, and why most professors in English, as well as history, prefer to oppose war and criticize the military rather than to study them. The Vietnam War changed the meaning of war and of the military in this country, at least on the left, and the cohort of professors that for the most part has dominated and set trends in these fields in the last twenty years is of the generation that came of age during the Vietnam era; most of these professors were students when the huge protest against the war took place, and most of them were against the war.

What struck me here is that thinking back to my high school and college days (late ’80s and early ’90s), I can recall that a great many novels about war were recommended to me, appearing on supplementary reading lists and the like, but I can’t think of an occasion when they were actually taught as part of the syllabus. I had to find Catch-22 and Going After Cacciato on my own; I never even heard of books like Dog Soldiers until I was out of college. This may speak more to the shortcomings of my schooling, but it’s interesting how rarely war literature made it to the discussion table.

Fountain on Papa

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ben Fountain, Ernest Hemingway

Ben Fountain, author of a tremendous 2006 short-story collection, Brief Encounters With Che Guevara, (my review of the book for Kirkus is on the book’s Barnes & Noble page) speaks with the Kansas City Star about Ernest Hemingway‘s influence on his work.

Several stories concern cultural collisions. Americans go overseas and find their values changed or confronted. In “The Good Ones Are Already Taken,” an American soldier goes to Haiti and comes home spiritually changed. To his wife’s dismay, he has “married,” in a spiritual sense, a Haitian goddess. Why are you interested in such themes?

For me, that’s where life is lived — in these train wrecks of cultural collisions. That’s where the most interesting things happen, where our notions of reality, and what’s good and what’s bad, are challenged in the most visceral ways. … What happens to you when you run up against another reality and you keep banging your face into it? That’s when we change. Ideas don’t really change us so much. It’s lived experience that changes us.

The interview appears on the eve of a large international Hemingway conference that opens in Kansas City tomorrow. As a thorough background piece in today’s Star explains, Hemingway lived briefly in K.C., starting his writing career as a cub reporter for the paper. As Steve Paul reports, just before Hemingway headed to Europe a colleague sent him off with a note that encouraged him to have bigger ambitions for his career:

“Hemmy, old scout, if you don’t pack up a Baby Corona and shoot some feature stuff to the Great Longanbaum when you get on the front you’re just a plain damn fool. This is your chance – the opportunity of your lifetime to make the limelight. You can do it. You can do it big. I don’t want to flatter you, but I’d give a million dollars in cold iron men if I possessed your originality. You see things. You know things. You read human interest like a book. And above all you can tell it. All you need to do is to keep your confidence in the Great Hemingstein screwed up to the highest pitch.”

Roundup: The Juice Is Loose

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ernest Hemingway, Jim Harrison, Mary Gordon, Richard Ford, Thomas McGuane, Truman Capote

Power’s back on (though my Internet connection is still a bit balky). A few things I missed:

Pakistan’s Daily Times has the complete text of Ernest Hemingway‘s “A Very Short Story.” Summary: war, letters, gonorrhea.

All those complaints about Truman Capote‘s shabby reporting are finally starting to penetrate: In Cold Blood is a “Classic American novel.”

In Michigan next Tuesdayon July 10? Richard Ford, Jim Harrison, and Thomas McGuane will all speak at MSU on June 10 as part of the Michigan Big Read. The last two should at least have some good Jack Nicholson stories.

Irish author Polly Devlin writes about running into Mary Gordon and soon decamping to teach at Columbia University in New York City, where “you are judged on your grooming and your status—not on your age.” Oh, Polly, you’re judged for everything there…

The Slows of Kilimanjaro

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ernest Hemingway

I’m starting to fall deeply in love with Voice of America Special English, a radio programming feature that combines the lightly chastising tone of NPR’s Morning Edition with the  two-thirds-speed wooziness of a screw tape. (I’ve written before about a feature VOASE did on Thomas McGuane and Cormac McCarthy.) New on the site is the first of a two-part piece on the life of Ernest Hemingway. The transcript is a nice enough read, but you really do have to download the MP3 and listen to comprehend the program’s pleasures–the sense that you’re back in an eighth-grade classroom, the languorous Calgon-take-me-away slowness, the assured and comforting voices of Shirley Griffith and Frank Oliver. When they get around to the bit about the shotgun in part two it’s gonna be agony, and it’s gonna be beautiful.

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ernest Hemingway

The London Guardian reports that a series of books designed to look like packs of cigarettes–spawned by the UK smoking ban–is creating some consternation among cigarette-makers. The squabble focuses on the Ernest Hemingway offering:

[N]ow the publishers are having to inhale deeply themselves as British American Tobacco (BAT) claims that one of the packs, containing Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Undefeated, resembles its own Lucky Strike pack. Claiming that such an association could seriously damage the health of the brand, BAT is trying to have the works pulped.

You can get a better glimpse a the books in the series here.