Coffee With Hemingway: Coffee With … Series

by: Kirk Curnutt; forward by John Updike

Published by: Duncan Baird Publishers

Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart

Rummaging around my favorite used bookstore, I stumbled on a copy of Coffee With Hemingway, from Duncan Baird Publishers’ Coffee With…Series. Papa was one of those people I would write about when high school teachers assigned an essay on the theme of “Who would I most like to have dinner with?”

Kirk Curnutt, author of Ernest Hemingway and the Expatriate Modernist Movement, was assigned to imagine he was conducting an interview over coffee with Papa. The little book became a “fictional dialogue based on biographical fact.” In this episode, Kirk and Papa are at Paris’ Closerie des Lilas café.

The fictional conversation covers ten themes: Ernie Agnostics; On War; On Expatriation; The Hemingway Style; Fiction vs. Nonfiction; On Food, Sport, and Ritual; On Feuds and Rivalries; On Wives; On Female Characters; and The Price of Fame.

Curnutt does a wonderful job in creating an atmosphere where I really believed that I was eavesdropping on their “coffee.” However, Papa’s answers did nothing but disillusion my romantic notions about sitting down with the greatest writer of the twentieth century. Hemingway came across as I’m sure he must have been in real life: rather vulgar, crass, annoying, and plain ol’ rude.

Armchair Interviews says: Another interesting addition to the Coffee With…Series.

Author’s Web site: http://www.KirkCurnutt.com