Ernest Hemingway
Story Stream
The Secret Inspiration for Hemingway’s Greatest Novel January 06, 2025
You don’t expect to find a hidden message in a book you first read when you were a teenager. Not when it’s part of the canon, analyzed for decades, with critical opinion on it a settled matter. But when I was asked to write an introduction to a new V...
Only in The New Yorker November 13, 2024
A book bearing the name Dorothy Parker ought to sell, so McNally Editions have been able to offer something interesting this month: a collection of book reviews! No essays or musings, no memoir, nothing that could or should be redone as a short story...
The Sun Also Sets November 13, 2024
The Library of America is something of a publishing curiosity. Its declared aim is to preserve America’s literary heritage “by publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing.” Yet, unlike those...
Masters of Horror and Magic November 07, 2024
Midway through the 1944 liberation of Paris, Ernest Hemingway told his newest fiancée: “Some of the patrols we made would scare you worse than Grimms’ Fairy Tales.” Hemingway would know; like Auden and Faulkner, Willa Cather and Toni Morrison, he was...
Hemingway, McCarthy, and Our ‘Used Up’ Words April 29, 2024
I used to dislike Ernest Hemingway’s style. His iceberg technique, with so much left beneath the surface, seemed cold in contrast to the sonatas of his contemporaries like F. Scott Fitzgerald. In a letter containing advice to the latter author, Hemin...
All a Matter of Tense April 10, 2024
You could construct a history of modern literature just by writing about boxing. Start with the Marquess of Queensberry, who both helped codify the rules of the sport and, by leaving a calling card addressed “To Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic]” i...
