The Importance of Not Being Ernest

Kurlansky Mark

Description

Mark Kurlansky has significant clout in the nonfiction world, which will benefit The Importance of Not Being Ernest immensely. He has won two James Beard awards, as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His books Cod, Salt, 1968, and Food of a Younger Land were all New York Times bestsellers along with The Basque History of the World, which was an international bestseller.

His articles have appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including The International Herald Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, Partisan Review, Harper’s, New York Times Sunday Magazine, Audubon Magazine, Food & Wine, Gourmet, Bon Apetit and Parade.

Mark Kurlansky's recognizable name and past success mean that The Importance of Not Being Ernest will be anticipated by many already interested fans and critics.

An Ernest Hemingway Biography Like No Other

“...illuminates his life and works in ways not seen before.” —Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award winner and author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through

#1 New Release in Historical Latin America Biographies

Discover Hemingway’s biography through the eyes of a fellow author and journalist. New York Times bestselling author of Salt, Mark Kurlansky turns his historical eye to the life of Ernest Hemingway. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, The Importance of Not Being Ernest shows the huge shadow Hemingway casts. 

The perfect gift for writers. By a series of coincidences, Mark Kurlansky’s life has always been intertwined with Ernest Hemingway's legend, starting with being in Idaho the day of Hemingway’s death. The Importance of Not Being Ernest explores the intersections between Hemingway’s and Kurlansky’s lives, resulting in creative accounts of two inspiring writing careers. Travel the world with Mark Kurlansky and Ernest Hemingway in this personal memoir, where Kurlansky details his ten years in Paris and his time as a journalist in Spain—both cities important to Hemingway’s adventurous life and prolific writing. 

Paris, Basque Country, Havana and Idaho. Get to know the extraordinary people he met there—those who had also fallen under the Hemingway spell, including a Vietnam veteran suffering from the same syndrome the author did, two winners of the Key West Hemingway look-alike contest, and the man in Idaho who took Hemingway hunting and fishing.

In this unique gift for writers, find:

• A memoir full of entertaining and illuminative stories
• Little-known historical facts about Hemingway’s life
• Anecdotes about those who suffer from what the Kurlansky calls “hemitis”

Readers of Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America, or The Boys will love The Importance of Not Being Ernest.

Prologue: A Dream Intrudes

Coevolving with the structure of the brain, language freed the mind from the animal to be creativity, thence to enter and imagine other worlds infinite in time and space.
--Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity

The truth is, I am a dreamer. This used to be a well-known fact about me. It was a frequent criticism. My father claimed I daydreamed in the crib. “What is he thinking about?” Mark daydreams in school. Daydreaming is not considered good. I suspect that my accusers had no idea the extent of my daydreaming. I was in an alternate universe most of the time. Only those who do daydream understand that this is strength, not a weakness.

I enjoyed the real world, but enjoying the other one is how I became a writer. I had conversations with myself about ideas, about people, about many things, and I enjoyed these conversations with myself.

Now you may be thinking “This is why he spends so much time fishing, because it gives him time to be alone daydreaming.” That is the complete opposite of the truth. The wonderful thing about fly fishing is that it affords freedom from thinking. It is the only time when the dream stops.

A good fly fisher is utterly thoughtless. The mind is working but you are thinking about what insects are hatching, what is floating in the river, where is the river swift and where does it break into still pools. Your mind turns into nothing more than a fish brain. You try to think like a trout. Fly-fishing requires that kind of concentration. A trout is focused on survival and I assume it has no time for abstractions. Neither does a good fisher.

I fish the Big Wood in Ketchum, Idaho, in the winter when few other fishermen are there to disturb my concentration, unbothered by the beavers stripping black bark from the cottonwoods. or the elk staring down at me from the steep sage brush mountains, or even a giant moose wandering down to the river to eat willow buds. My interest is rainbow trout, as beautiful an animal as nature has ever offered.

In the winter of 2012, I had just turned 63—I was watching my artificial black spikey midge drift in the Big Wood trying to lure a rainbow trout along a deep trench on the opposite bank. Maybe it would work better with a drop, a second fly—perhaps a larger dry fly floating on the surface where I could see it. Then I thought about how Hemingway fished the Big Wood with two drops, three flies in all.

Now I was lost. My mind had slipped into that other world. It is true that to be in Ketchum and never think about Hemingway is as unlikely as being in Sherwood Forest with not a thought of Robin Hood. I thought not about the rainbow trout but about the fact that only a half mile upriver along the bank Hemingway had stood behind his house and blown his head off with a shotgun—literally nothing left of his head but fragments along the black-trunked cottonwood bank, maybe some even in the river where trout and merganser ducks might feed on it.

Then came a shocking revelation. I was older than Hemingway ever lived to be. I was now older than the grizzled old man who called himself Papa,-- older than that battle-worn, thinning white haired, stooped old Papa ever lived to be. This made me feel quite old, realizing that the old man in all the pictures around town was actually younger than me. But it was not an entirely negative feeling. I also had a feeling of liberation, as though I had outlived his ghost. I had a whole life ahead of me that Hemingway never had.

I had post-Hemingway years—decades, I hoped.

Until then, it had felt like Papa had followed me everywhere. He was certainly an inescapable presence here in Ketchum, where every bar and restaurant had Hemingway memorabilia.

I started thinking about how many of the places that were important in my life had also been Hemingway places. I had spent much of my life not only with the ghost of Hemingway, but around people who were still obsessed with that ghost and a few who had even been with the actual living Hemingway and would never forget him.

PROLOGUE: A Dream Intrudes

CHAPTER ONE: Entrances and Exits
CHAPTER TWO: A Writer Must Escape
CHAPTER THREE: The Grass in Paris
CHAPTER FOUR: The Patent-leather Soul of Spain
CHAPTER FIVE: Cuba and the Unspeakable Feast
CHAPTER SIX: Idaho and the Last Escape
EPILOGUE: Unnatural New York

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sujets

• historical
• Lettres et linguistique
• Biography
• History of the Americas
• Autobiography
• Mark Kurlansky

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 31 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781642504644
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

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