Travels with Myself and Another — Love and Ruin
TRAVELS WITH MYSELF AND ANOTHER — LOVE AND RUIN What fun to read simultaneously two books about the same person, one a memoir published in 1978, the other a 2018 novel reimagining the memoirist’s life. I knew of Martha Gellhorn, but I had never pieced together her story. I never appreciated how truly gifted she […]
West with the Night
West with the Wind Not long ago I reviewed Circling the Sun for “Bookin’ with Sunny.” Circling the Sun is Paula McLain’s fictional rendition of Beryl Markham, an early twentieth-century woman pilot who was as accomplished as Amelia Earhart. At the time, I wrote that “the fictional Beryl Markham is absolutely life-like; her imagined story, […]
Circling the Sun
Circling the Sun – Paula McLain has written “Probably the very best” novel fictionalizing the life of a well-known person. When I reviewed Paula McLain’s previous novel, The Paris Wife, I described it as a “psychologically astute portrayal” of Ernest Hemingway’s first spouse. Indeed I thought The Paris Wife was one of the best novels […]
The Paris Wife, #2
Why do we need yet another book about the life and times of Ernest Hemingway, especially when there are already so many good ones? Because this particular book, The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, portrays the fledgling young writer through the eyes of Hadley Richardson, the woman married to him during those early Paris years. […]
date of disappearance assorted stories
Let me preface this review by saying that I’m not a great fan of short stories. That’s a result, I think, of teaching too many sophomore survey English courses where short fiction dominated every textbook every year. And too often they were the same stories—penned by Hawthorne and Hemingway and a handful of others—over and […]
A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses
This book, a mere 146 pages of text, is jam-packed with wonderfully offbeat information about a variety of American writers and their homes, now designated museums. Trubeck’s purpose in writing the book was to “expose not simply Whitman’s house, but all of the writers’ house museums as the frauds I believed them to be.” What […]
The Paris Wife
Paula McLain has written a rather spectacular piece of historical fiction in her rendering of Hadley Richardson’s marriage to American literary legend Ernest Hemingway. The Paris Wife is written in Hadley’s voice, and as much as the book takes in Hemingway and a huge cast of fellow-American and other expatriate writers in Paris, the story […]