Essential for students of modern literature, offering insight into the mind and methods of one of the greatest practitioners...
A gathering of some of Papa’s best—and not so best—short fiction, the genre for which he first became known and is perhaps most honored today.
Ernest Hemingway, as his grandson and editor Seán observes in his excellent introductory essay, was a newspaper reporter before all else, and he learned much from his Kansas City newspaper’s style guide, including the dicta to use short, active sentences and ledes and to “be sparing of extravagant adjectives.” Extraneous adjectives. Extra adjectives, even. In this edition, some of Hemingway’s stories are presented in a draft format, always with cuts and sometimes with additions, that illustrates the application of these rules: “One hot evening in Milan they carried him up onto the roof and I could look out over all the other roofs the flat top of the town,” the phrase “all the other roofs” and the word “flat” thereupon being deleted to yield the desired flatness. In other instances, as with a draft of “Indian Camp,” not just deletions, but a few false starts are highlighted, as is true of the crystalline, now-perfect story “Soldier’s Home,” in which Hemingway removed an obvious description: “then tears came out, then her eyes were red and she was crying” gives way to the simpler “she started crying.” Hemingway’s simple style has been the object of parody and imitation for nine decades, but it is plain from these pages how hard he worked at it, as stories such as the much-revised “A Canary for One” reveal; one wishes for an edition such as Harcourt made of Eliot’s Waste Land showing every single note and draft of stories such as “Big Two-Hearted River” and “A Way You’ll Never Be,” the latter presented here without emendation, as is “The Killers” and a few other of Hemingway’s best-known tales.
Essential for students of modern literature, offering insight into the mind and methods of one of the greatest practitioners of the story form.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8762-6
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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