The Torment of Queer Literature
Queer literature isn’t a box to unlock so that it can unlock me.
...more
Posts Tagged: Ernest Hemingway
Notable NYC: 6/16–6/22
Literary events in and around New York City this week!
...more
The Miracle Bowl
Praise the family that tethers me. Praise the well-used kitchen utensils and scoured mixing bowls and butter knives, thick slabs of jelly on the bread.
...more
What to Read When You Don’t Want Summer to End
A list of books that take place in the summer, remind us of summer, and/or just make for great beach reads.
...more
What to Read When Things Go Nuclear
Here are some books to read that will remind you that there is beauty out there, even if it’s hard-wrought.
...moreThe Power of the Common Tongue
For The Millions, Lauren Alwan provides “a brief history” and analysis of colloquial titles, including works from authors like Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Lorrie Moore, and Raymond Carver. In addition, Alwan offers her insights as to what makes colloquial titles so appealing: There is a certain power in hearing phrases we know and may have used […]
...moreGrowing Up Hemingway
I was trained in basic cocktails by the time I was 6. In two new books, Mariel Hemingway shares her experiences of growing up in a family plagued by mental illness and addiction and how she was able to overcome it. The LA Times has more.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Elliot Ackerman
Elliot Ackerman discusses his debut novel Green on Blue, fighting with the Marine Corps in the Second Battle of Fallujah, and being labeled as a journalist .
...moreThe Rodney Dangerfield of Literature
For The Daily Beast, Bill Morris has some theories about why Jim Harrison is an underrated writer.
...more
The Big Idea: Eula Biss
On Immunity author Eula Biss speaks to Suzanne Koven about mythology, personal freedom, and the history of vaccines.
...moreRealism is a Figure of Speech
For the Atlantic’s “By Heart” series, Vikram Chandra discusses the influence of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” highlighting what makes for good “minimalism”: It’s not about what you say. It’s about what you leave out—and the intelligent reader will be able to sense the weight of all that’s been omitted.
...moreSeriously Serious
Over at the Paris Review, Jason Novak has taken up the pen again; this time, he’s turned to authors and their eccentricities. Among his observations: “Somewhere Hemingway is sitting quietly at his desk. Pouring another bull. And fighting another drink.” Other targets include Don DeLillo, Jane Austen, Hegel, Nabokov, Heidegger, and the state of Publishing […]
...moreRising to Literature’s Bait
From Ernest Hemingway to Richard Brautigan and Jim Harrison, fishing and literature has always had a strong, mysterious link. Over at The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone goes deep into this ancient relationship.
...moreLiterature at the Ritz-Carlton
At The Millions, Tracy O’Neill deconstructs the Ritz-Carlton’s new “Six Word Wows” ad campaign. The hotel chain calls for guests to describe their stay in six words or less, using the hashtag #RCMemories, and claims to be ““Paying Homage to a Classic Ernest Hemingway Line.” O’Neill frames her essay with Thomas Frank’s assertion that, since the mid-90s, […]
...moreLetters From Ernest
For the New York Review of Books, Edward Mendelson writes about the second volume of Ernest Hemingway’s letters (1923-25), published by Cambridge University Press: What makes the book revelatory is not its biographical detail but the spacious view it gives of Hemingway’s mind at work in his long, eager, and unguarded letters to boyhood friends.
...moreHow Fitzgerald Shaped Hemingway
An early draft of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises focused on Brett Ashley, the woman who serves as a love interest to protagonist Jake Barnes and others. The revised manuscript owes much to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote a letter filled with withering criticism of the earlier version, leading Hemingway to edit out much of […]
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Echo of Hemingway’s Shotgun
In her home in the quiet town of Ketchum, a “stone’s throw” away from the infamous house where Hemingway took his own life, Eileen Shields considers the complex interplay of masculinity, guns, and suicide.
...moreErnest Hemingway Was…
You may have seen the recent series of UN Women ads using screenshots of Google auto-complete suggestions to educate viewers about sexist stereotypes. This Book Riot post does the same thing but with famous authors—for example, when you type in “Ernest Hemingway was,” what does Google predict you’ll type next? According to Book Riot, “the takeaways […]
...moreHeaven, According to Hemingway
Maria Popova of Brain Pickings has featured a 1925 letter from Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which Hemingway describes his personal conception of heaven (after playfully guessing at Fitzgerald’s). As an added bonus, check out the snapshot of Scott and Ernest palling around in Paris. Hemingway looking remarkably casual and contemporary next to […]
...moreWriting and Drinking and Writing about Drinking
Alcohol and authors. It’s a subject so old and rich and fraught you could write a book on it—which is exactly what Olivia Laing did. That book is called The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink, and Blake Morrison’s review of it in the Guardian is itself a great essay on the subject, covering writers’ love […]
...more
Literary Puns
Timothy Leo Taranto illustrates some of literature’s greats, including David Foster Wallace and Gromit, Flan-nery O’Connor, and John Frankensteinbeck.
...moreSnow Angels
Flavorwire has a collection of photos of authors frolicking in frozen weather. Neil Gaiman’s dog has a weird leash, while Hemingway looks just jaunty as hell.
...moreThe Stick-Figure Antics of Hemingway’s Wartime Pals
What comes to mind when you think of Ernest Hemingway? Simple declarative sentences, the banal horror of war, endless rounds of booze, and…whimsical schoolboy-style doodles? Hemingway’s fellow ambulance drivers drew him some cartoons to cheer him up while he was in the hospital, and Slate has posted them in all their goofy glory. Don’t worry—they […]
...moreThe Hemingway Papers
The Toronto Star‘s well-designed archive of Ernest Hemingway’s newspaper articles for the Canadian paper provides access to evidence of the young author honing his spartan style and exploring his favorite themes. One such exceedingly-Hemingway gem is from an article about getting a free shave from amateur barbers: “For a visit to the barber college requires […]
...more“I Liked It and I Didn’t”
In this 1934 letter, Ernest Hemingway gives F. Scott Fitzgerald his honest opinion on Fitzgerald’s new novel, Tender Is the Night. “Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with […]
...moreSaturday History Lessons: That Time Wallace Stevens Punched Hemingway
Truth be told I don’t like macho posturing in literary feuds — or rather, the only thing I like about it is the opportunity it provides me to practice the fine art of eye-rolling. Oh, and the particular thrill to the female camaraderie that can arise in the audience of these things when and where […]
...moreWhat Is Already Living: Author, Autobiography and Fiction in the Age of Social Networking
WRITE YOUR STORY reads the advertising placard for corporate octopus Citibank on display in the Union Square subway station in Manhattan. The campaign’s thrust appears to be this: by spending money, being a consumer, one, in fact, indites a story on the face of the everyday.
...moreHemingway’s Decline
Does Ernest Hemingway’s death outshine his literary prowess? At the end of Hemingway’s life, he was subjected to electro-shock treatment to treat his paranoid depression, which resulted in memory loss and subsequently the loss of his writerly abilities—this all after six major brain traumas. Reading about all of the injuries (emotional and physical) incurred during […]
...more
Twenty and Bored and Alive
This voice is neither howl, yowl, nor whisper, but something more like a quiet monotone, slightly ironic and yet also depressed, lonely and, at times, compellingly vulnerable.
...more