Episodes
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Happy holidays from One True Podcast, and it wouldn’t be the holiday season without Suzanne del Gizzo—the celebrated editor of The Hemingway Review—here to discuss another one of Hemingway’s seasonally appropriate works. In previous years, we have talked together about “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” “Christmas on the Roof of the World,” “The Christmas Gift,” and “A North of Italy Christmas.” This year, we explore “The Blind Man’s Christmas Eve,” an article Hemingway wrote for The Toronto Star in December 1923.
With Suzanne, we place the story in its historical and biographical contexts, delve into the relationship between the main character and the curious narrative perspective, examine how physical and metaphorical blindness works in the story, and connect the story to other Hemingway works such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," "Get a Seeing-Eyed Dog," and Islands in the Stream. We also think about the importance of the song “My Old Kentucky Home,” which the main character hears an Italian organ grinder play.
As a special gift to our listeners, we begin the episode with a reading of “The Blind Man’s Christmas Eve” by former guest Mackenzie Astin, star of The Facts of Life, The Magicians, and In Love and War, where he played the young Henry Villard opposite Chris O’Donnell’s Hemingway and Sandra Bullock’s Agnes von Kurowsky. We also end the episode with another treat--a moving rendition of "My Old Kentucky Home" by Hemingway scholar Michael Kim Roos, who appeared as a guest on one of our previous shows on A Farewell to Arms.
Thanks for another great year, everybody. Enjoy! -
Welcome to the seventeenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.
Hemingway captures a scene out of the American newspapers, the execution by hanging of an Italian-American mobster, Sam Cardinella. We discuss Hemingway’s career-long treatment of executions and the behavior of those facing death, along with the detached behavior of those administering punishment. We parse out the discrepancy of a vocabulary word, and we also analyze the eventual placement of this episode into the dreamscape of a young Nick Adams. The power of this chapter represents one of the great achievements of this book.Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!
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Episodes manquant?
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Ruchika Tomar, the 2020 PEN/Hemingway winner for A Prayer for Travelers, shares her one true sentence from “A Very Short Story.”
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Welcome to the sixteenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.
In this episode, Maera is gored and dies in a masterfully cinematic way. We explore Hemingway's description of the bullfighter's death and speculate about why Hemingway decided to kill off his character "Maera" when the real bullfighter was still alive when in our time was published. We also draw comparisons between this vignette and other Hemingway works like "A Banal Story" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and consider its important placement in the later short story sequence of 1925.
Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time! -
Welcome to the fifteenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.
This episode on Maera and Luis extends Hemingway’s exploration of bullfighting and violence. We begin by discussing the narrator's identity, how it is revealed in the story, and why that matters; by the end of the episode, we focus attention on the final lines of the vignette ("Yes. Yes. Yes.), exploring the relationship between Hemingway's work and Molly Bloom's soliloquy that ends James Joyce's Ulysses. Throughout the episode, we're fascinated by the triangulation of the narrator, Maera, and Luis and how it structures this curious vignette.
Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time! -
As One True Podcast winds down its ambitious year-long project of devoting an episode to each of the eighteen chapters in in our time, we visit with the man who wrote the book about the book, Milton A. Cohen.
Cohen’s study of the Paris in our time, Hemingway’s Laboratory, is a keen guide through the sketches and analyzes Hemingway as a writer finding his voice. In our interview with Cohen, he describes Hemingway’s artistry, the innovations he sees in the vignettes, some of his favorite moments in the book, and even things Hemingway left out from the manuscript.
Join us as Milton A. Cohen guides us through in our time! -
Robert W. Trogdon joins One True Podcast to share the treasures of the new Library of America volume he has edited: A Farewell to Arms and Other Writings, 1927-1932. We discuss Hemingway and his life during those magical, turbulent years, and also the great work he produced.
From his second short story collection, Men Without Women to his second novel, A Farewell to Arms, to the unexpected turn his career takes, the bullfighting treatise titled Death in the Afternoon, Trogdon guides us through these works and these eventful years. Trogdon also discusses the various textual issues he faced while editing this volume, including the expletives of A Farewell to Arms, an inverted paragraph that nobody knew about, and Hemingway’s vision for the bullfighting photographs in Death in the Afternoon.
Join us as we discuss the second Hemingway offering from the Library of America with its editor! -
Welcome to the fourteenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.
This episode continues Hemingway’s exploration of bullfighting and violence through a study of Nicanor Villalta. In two short paragraphs, Hemingway masterfully captures the movement of matador and bull, leading up to the pivotal image where "Villalta became one with the bull." We discuss how Hemingway depicts good vs. bad bullfighters; we consider the stylistic function of so many present participles in the vignette; and we touch on connections to The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon, and Across the River and Into the Trees.
Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time! -
Welcome to the thirteenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.
This episode continues Hemingway’s exploration of bullfighting and violence. This chapter is the second of the five consecutive bullfighting sketches Hemingway placed towards the end of in our time. A raucous crowd objects to a bad bullfight, leading to the humiliating cutting of a matador’s pigtails. We discuss the narrator’s relationship to the incompetent (but self-aware) matador, the notion of throwing things at sporting events, and the painful recognition of realizing you’re just not that good at something.
Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time! -
Stewart O’Nan, the prolific author of West of Sunset and other works of fiction and non-fiction, shares his one true sentence from “The End of Something.”
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One True Podcast takes on another classic Hemingway short story as Olivia Carr Edenfield joins us to discuss “Cross-Country Snow,” the beloved Nick Adams story from In Our Time.
Prof. Edenfield discusses how this skiing trip links Nick’s past with his future, how it fits as a crucial pivot in the story cycle, the Nick-George relationship, the mysterious waitress, the wonderful description of skiing, how the story reflects Hemingway’s biography of the mid-1920s … and that curious title.
This episode on “Cross-Country Snow” is the latest installment of One True Podcast’s ambitious project to tackle every Hemingway short story. Join us for this latest effort! -
Welcome to the twelfth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.
In this episode, we discuss Hemingway's powerful depiction of a bullfighting scene between bull and horse. We start out with that famous "whack whacked" opening before turning to what might be an equally important and seriously overlooked (by us!) part of the story. In addition, we read this vignette in light of Hemingway's remarks about gored horses from The Sun Also Rises and Death in the Afternoon. Just as with previous vignettes, we also focus time on the last sentence and why the chapter ends the way it does.
Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time! -
Welcome to the eleventh of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.
Listeners might be familiar with this vignette as the short story "The Revolutionist" from Hemingway's bigger collection In Our Time published in 1925. How does the vignette characterize the post-WWI communist revolution and its revolutionaries as well as counter-responses in Hungary, Italy, and Switzerland? Why does the narrator seem to fixate on classical painters, particularly the work of Mantegna? What are the connections between this story and other Hemingway works like A Farewell to Arms? In this episode, we respond to these questions and many more as we delve into a vignette that often gets glossed over!
Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time! -
Javier Fuentes, the 2024 PEN/Hemingway winner for Countries of Origin, shares his one true sentence from "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."
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Live from Bilbao! One True Podcast presents our show live from the 20th International Hemingway Conference in Bilbao, Spain. We welcome scholars Stacey Guill and Alberto Lena to explore Hemingway’s five stories of the Spanish Civil War. These obscure, under-discussed stories – including “The Denunciation,” “The Butterfly and the Tank,” and “Landscape With Figures” – become coherent and significant as our guests explore their roots in Spanish culture and history as well as Hemingway’s own life.
We learn about Hemingway’s perspective about the war, the way the stories set the groundwork for For Whom the Bell Tolls, his focus on “dignity” in the stories, and the ambiguity of his endings. This conversation will inspire you to visit or revisit these narratives, armed with the context Guill and Lena provide. -
One True Podcast welcomes the great Larry Grimes to discuss “Today Is Friday,” the curious playlet from Men Without Women about three Roman soldiers and a Jewish barman discussing Jesus’s crucifixion.
This interview explores the resonance of the story and what it tells us about Hemingway’s lifelong quest for the religious experience. We discuss Hemingway’s fascination with executions, masculine Christianity, and hybrid religions. We also explore how the 3rd Roman Soldier unexpectedly emerges as one of the great characters of Hemingway’s short fiction.
“Today Is Friday” continues One True Podcast’s ambitious project of tackling every Hemingway short story. Join us for this latest effort! -
Welcome to the tenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.
This chapter will be familiar to many readers as the bitter narrative that would later be presented as “A Very Short Story.” Here, this vignette is the longest in this volume. Is it also the most autobiographical? We discuss the ill-fated World War I love affair between our hero and Ag (later Luz), doomed due to an insurmountable age gap, our hero’s bad attitude, the presence of smooth-talking Italians, and an ocean in between them. Hemingway turned the early trauma of a Dear John letter into this raw, painful self-examination that attempted to exorcise his own experiences. In this episode we also explore how this chapter provides a fascinating precis of this relationship’s fuller articulation in A Farewell to Arms.
Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time! -
Welcome to the ninth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.
This chapter is the first of the vignettes set in America, a fictionalized account of a cigar store robbery that Hemingway learned about in Kansas City in 1917. We discuss this sketch’s depiction of national confusion, moral ambiguity, attitudes towards immigrants, and how Hemingway’s specific language renders a complex scene. Through our conversation, the subtle division emerges between Drevitts and Boyle and how Hemingway’s characters are able to say things without stating them.
Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time! -
One True Podcast celebrates the publication of Volume 6 of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway by welcoming two of its editors, Sandra Spanier and Verna Kale. These letters, spanning 1934-1936, find Hemingway in Key West, fishing, publishing Green Hills of Africa, producing his Esquire dispatches, making his famous reaction to the Florida hurricane of 1935, and negotiating the competing demands of life, art, business, and celebrity.
We discuss Hemingway’s relationships with his correspondents: Arnold Gingrich of Esquire, Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s, Jane Mason, critic Ivan Kashkin, John Dos Passos, and more.
Join us as we visit once again with the Hemingway Letters team to explore Hemingway’s letters from these crucial years! -
We continue our exploration of Hemingway's short stories with his masterful narrative, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." To aid us in this effort, we're joined by Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, who is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico and served as the 2022 Obama Fellow at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies. Herlihy-Mera is the author of, among other works, Decolonizing American Spanish.
In this conversation, we examine key dynamics between the major characters in this very short story. Along the way, we ponder the various religious and existential themes that emerge as well as the bilingual nature of the story and how to read and appreciate the story in translation.
Join us as we meet up with two waiters and an old man in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." - Montre plus
