Word: hemingways
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...here's a novel that functions both as serious art and as a compelling adventure story, and manages to pull it off with a lot of style. In Port Tropique Barry Gifford does what Hemingway did in To Have and Have Not and what Conrad did in Nostromo--he conveys a gripping story line and a distinctive aesthetic. With all the control of the masters, the 34-year-old Gifford has produced an intriguing literary experiment in the guise of a page-turnes complete with palm trees, speedboats and revolutionaries...
This same minimalism characterizes the prose. Gifford has cleared away the fatuousness and swagger that disfigures the writing of most young writers, leaving a terse prose that is controlled and accurate and clean to a degree that rivals Hemingway and Camus. Gifford describes the world cooly, and precisely, yet always loads the prose with feeling. His lyrical economy haunts us like the voices of our dreams; somehow it all stands out. There is something undeniable about sentences like this...
Something at the heart of the whole thing is disgusting. This is not boxing on television. Where the fuck is Hemingway? Where's Papa? There are just these two guys with nothing to lose and nothing to win missing punches in the middle of this silence and this indifference and the noise from the heaters, rumbling, rumbling. I am beginning to be very scared. An enormous sourness fills me. What is wrong with...
...Ambition and success seem simply to have departed from the American novel. In the novels of Hemingway almost no work is good work-or, much the same thing, manly work-unless it confronts danger; one is permitted to be a bullfighter, a fisherman, a soldier, and of course a novelist, but all other work is trivial. In the work of a more rounded novelist, Willa Cather ... success is admired, but only success in the past: the new men that have arisen to seize it are grubby, narrow, without vision, unlike the heroic pioneer generation with its integrity, honor, heroism. William...
When writers paused for breath, Mayes would start talking. By the time he had finished, their names were often affixed to contracts. F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of his authors; so were Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk, Agatha Christie, Art Linkletter, Clare Boothe Luce, Ogden Nash, Hubert Humphrey, Jacqueline Kennedy, Lucille Ball and Maurice Chevalier, and most of them are worth a story or two. Mayes treated them with amused kindness, helped them through personal crises and paid them well, even for that golden age of magazines: $10,000 per short story for Somerset...