The below statement of the history Joan Miró The Farmis taken, in large part, from the printout of the National Gallery of Art and its description of its provenance.
In all of my reading about Hemingway, I don’t have a clear impression as to whether or not he was a devoted art lover. I do know, though, that he loved the paint by Joan Miró called The Farm. It was painted on oil canvass in 1921-22 and Hemingway’s path crossed with Miró, Dali, Picasso during the Paris years of the 20s. Hemingway and Hadley (his wife at the time) acquired it somewhere toward the end of 1925. It’s not clear if their friend Evan Shipman had it previously. It stayed within Hemingway family until Mary Welsh Hemingway, Hemingway’s fourth wife and his wife at the time of his death, bequeathed it in 1987 to the National Gallery.
That is the Miro in Hem’s Dining room in Cuba. It’s larger than i expected
There is a bit of history and backstory, however. Hemingway wrote in a 1934 article that Evan Shipman originally wanted to buy it and then he reconsidered and thought Hemingway should have the painting. The story goes that the two rolled dice for it and Hemingway won purchasing the painting from Galerie Pierre by paying for it in monthly installments.
When Hemingway and Hadley divided their personalty when they were divorced in December 1926, Hemingway delivered the painting to Hadley (per Carlos Baker, Hemingway’s biographer). Hadley maintained the painting for a few years lending it on occasion to various exhibitions. In approximately 1934, Hemingway, who was then living in Key West, asked Hadley to lend it to him for a time and she did. Despite a bitter divorce, they were on good terms and co-parented their son Jack before co-parenting was a “thing.”
Hemingway then lent the painting to a Miró exhibit in New York and the painting was shipped back to Hemingway. He never returned it to Hadley despite requests by her. When he moved to Cuba in 1939/1940, the painting remained in his possession until his death in 1961.
When Hadley was interviewed by Alice Sokoloff she said, “Everyone Ernest married after me thought the Miró belonged to her.”
After Hemingway’s death, Hadley and Mary reached an agreement out of court through their lawyers. Mary paid Hadley in return for Hadley given up her claims to the painting. Mary bequeathed to the National Gallery.
Oh boy, Is this great?! while not an action packed play, i’m sure, I can’t wait to see this. And Aaron Hotchner. If anyone can adapt the book, he can. Always a loyal friend to Hemingway. Best for the new year to all Hemingway readers: fans, not such fans, and the obsessed like me. Happy new year! Christine
Actor Anthony Crivello plays the roll of Santiago in a stage adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea” during a dress rehearsal at the Pittsburgh Playhouse in Pittsburgh Sunday, Jan. 27, 2019. The stage version was written by journalist and playwright AE Hotchner, the writer’s confidant and fishing companion in Cuba during the period in which the novella was written, and his son Tim Hotchner. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)
It was 1952 when novelist Ernest Hemingway published his Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Old Man and the Sea” — the sparingly written story of the down-on-his-luck Cuban fisherman Santiago, and his desperate attempt to catch a marlin after 85 increasingly desperate days without one.
But before the book’s release, Hemingway gave the manuscript to his friend A.E. Hotchner, also then in Cuba, and asked him for his opinion.
“I must say, I was transported. Imagine for the first time seeing the wrinkled-up pages and reading what will become an epic of American literature,” Hotchner tells Here & Now‘s Robin Young.
Years later, when the movie based on the book, starring Spencer Tracy, opened in 1958, Hemingway took Hotchner with him to see it. When they left, Hemingway told his friend that maybe one day he — Hotchner — could try to do it better.
“Ernest was rather direct and he said, ‘Maybe someday you’ll take a shot at it,’ ” Hotchner recalls.
Ernest Hemingway’s close friend and biographer A.E. Hotchner holds a photograph of the pair together, Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2019, at the Hotchner family home in Westport, Conn. (Kathy Willens/AP)
That was 61 years ago. Now, at age 101, Hotchner has done just that alongside his son Tim. The stage adaptation of “The Old Man and the Sea” the two wrote together will open at the Pittsburgh Playhouse of Point Park University on Friday, in partnership with RWS Entertainment Grou
Interview HighlightsOn the moment when Hemingway gave him “The Old Man and the Sea” manuscript
A.E. Hotchner: “Well we just had dinner. I had gone into my guest house and he came in with a sheaf of typewritten manuscript in his hand and he said, ‘I just finished this. Mary typed it up. Would you like take a look at it?’ And I said, ‘Sure leave it.’
“A few weeks later, he called and said, ‘Life magazine wants to publish it in one issue, but I wonder if I should save it to do a bigger book about the sea?’ And I said, ‘Well, you told me one of the golden rules of freelancing is if you write something and they want to publish it, grab the money and run.’ So we did. And let’s go about five years later, he’s come to New York for the World Series. But ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ has just been made into a movie with Spencer Tracy. We’re walking down Park Avenue and he said, ‘Why don’t we go and take a look at it?’ which we did, and we lasted about 10 or 12 minutes and he turned to me and said, ‘I’m ready to go.’ And I said sure. So we left and he said, ‘You know, you write something and you like it. Over the years it does well, and then they do this to it. It’s like pissing in your father’s beer.’ “
On tackling the stage adaptation of “The Old Man and the Sea”
A.E.: “It took me a long time. I wrote my biography of him, ‘Papa Hemingway.’ I did that five years after he died. But over the years, I kept thinking about him saying, ‘Why don’t you take a shot at it?’ And finally, I decided I would. It took me four or five years to get the version that I liked and I brought my son into it. We have high hopes.”
Tim Hotchner: “Well we spent about two months on it before rehearsals, really kind of reimagining the story, because you know it’s such a difficult one to put on the stage. Obviously it works beautifully as a book. So we really had a look at it. My father had the great idea of putting Hemingway in the piece.”
“This book has become such a treasure. It’s really a great example of how one man’s devotion to the cause of his life — which is the sea — is everybody’s devotion to some cause.”A.E. Hotchner
On the meaning behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
A.E.: “You understand that this book has become such a treasure. It’s really a great example of how one man’s devotion to the cause of his life — which is the sea — is everybody’s devotion to some cause, this old man and his attitude and his achievement, and yet he falls short. But in a way, that touches the course of everyone’s life. That’s really what goes out on the stage.”
Tim: “It had been 11 years since Hemingway wrote ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’and he had a lot to prove at this time in his career as well.”
A.E.: “He had previously, not very long before, written a novel called ‘Across the River and into the Trees.’ And for the first time in his long writing life, that book had been roundly assaulted by the critics, the sharks. So now, he has to organize himself to write a rebuttal. And ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ is Hemingway, the old man, getting back at the elements that have attacked his virtuosity.”
Ernest Hemingway’s close friend and biographer A.E. Hotchner, left, and his son Tim Hotchner, a documentary filmmaker and writer, chat during an interview with The Associated Press, Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2019, at the family’s home in Westport, Conn. (Kathy Willens/AP)
On Hemingway’s personality
A.E.: “Well Hemingway and I had many adventures together — bullfighting, fishing. But he was not the braggadocio, knock-down-the-opposition man, that has sort of endured over the years. He was really much more introspective, much quieter. He was belligerent and he was tough … but that was not the overriding menace of his personality.”
On capturing the essence of Hemingway onstage
Tim: “So once we started to kind of play with reimagining it and that dichotomy, we kind of started to think Hemingway could move around. He can be a part of not just the narration, but a part of the exploration to actually bring out what I think Mr. Hemingway was getting at with a lot of the character traits, especially of Santiago. He’s a moving, living, breathing character. And again, this is I think Hemingway’s most sensitive piece in terms of nature and our relationship to the environment and the sun and the moon and stars and all these things that these days, we seem to want to kind of conquer. And Hemingway was saying, ‘Let’s just sit back and behold some of these.’ “
On what Hemingway would think of their stage adaptation
A.E.: “It’s very hard to know. I think that he would applaud the fact that we didn’t put the book on a pedestal and just replicate it. … It did bother me for a lot of years, that tossing around in my mind. I couldn’t find a way to get it away from its literary self and into its dramatic self.”
Tim: “And to just see my old man, kind of in his perseverance and his kind of going back after the marlin repeatedly, I mean he’s always said that’s what’s gotten him to 101. That we can be destroyed, but we can’t be defeated, I guess.”
Good morning, Hemingway Readers: I’ve edited the below to focus on Hemingway but it is interesting all around! By Paul French, a true crime writer. I added a few photos.Thanks for reading Hemingway. Best, Christine
What authors from Kipling to Hemingway and Auden made of Hong Kong, good and bad
Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Auden, Ian Fleming – ‘Asia’s world city’ attracted some of the globe’s most celebrated writers
Author Paul French recalls how they praised, and condemned, Hong Kong
Visiting writers have had a mixed response to Hong Kong over the years.
Rudyard Kipling may have gone on to be dubbed the “Bard of the British Empire”, but he had nothing good to say about Hong Kong, which he visited in 1889, only to be outraged by the presence of white prostitutes (he’d never had any problems with Indian ones in the brothels of Lahore.
The Painted Veil
Somerset Maugham was famously “welcome only once” wherever he went. This was due to his rather scurrilous short stories that resulted from his travels, and which enraged expats in the likes of Malaya and Singapore. In 1925, Maugham’s novel The Painted Veil was published. It was set partly in Hong Kong, which he had visited. The story of the lovely but shallow Kitty Fane, adulterous wife of Walter, a bacteriologist stationed in China, and of her husband’s revenge, outraged Hong Kong
The 2006 movie of the novel (the third film adaptation) , starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts, also shied away from the British colony and set the adulterous affair in Shanghai. With cinema audiences, at least, Shanghai’s reputation as sin city has frequently overwhelmed that of Hong Kong, though – in keeping with tradition – after The Painted Veil, Maugham was no longer welcome in the territory.
American playwright Eugene O’Neill sought to escape the hassles of success and a failed marriage, and travel to Shanghai in 1928. When his liner finally reached Victoria Harbour, O’Neill opted to stay aboard, deciding that Hong Kong was “too damp” for him. Once in , he had a nervous breakdown.
In 1938, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood came to Hong Kong, en route for China, to cover the war with Japan. The trip led to their book Journey to a War (1939). They described it as a city of dinner parties, dinner jackets and taxis home.
War brought smart and savvy American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn to town in 1941. It was her first trip to the East and – despite her reason for coming – she had visions of a Maugham-type colonial lifestyle in the Orient. Gellhorn liked Hong Kong, but she was keen to get up into China and see the war. However, she was having a hard time shifting her “UC”.
Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway with unidentified Chinese military officers in Chungking, in 1941. Picture: JFK Presidential Library
The “Unwilling Companion” in question was her new husband and supposed war correspondent colleague Ernest Hemingway. Reporting their marriage, some wag at the South China Morning Post came up with the (rather good) headline, “For Whom the Belle Falls”.
Gellhorn was independent and tough. She had been a foreign correspondent in Paris with United Press in the early 1930s, then worked for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration during the Great Depression, as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Her work with photographer Dorothea Lange, documenting America’s poorest communities, resulted in one of the great books of the Depression, The Trouble I’ve Seen (1936).
Gellhorn had met Hemingway and then gone to cover the Spanish civil war and Nazi Germany. Now she wanted to see the war in China. However, the Post was only interested in Hemingway, whose arrival they eagerly anticipated. Gellhorn was dismissed in a passing mention as “a bottle blonde” – she certainly was not.
UC Hemingway had immediately taken to Hong Kong. He was happy to find a ready circle of hangers-on to praise him and pour his drinks at the bar of the Hongkong Hotel (which was on Pedder Street, in Central). Former Shanghailander and New Yorker correspondent Emily Hahn claimed Hemingway introduced the concept of the Bloody Mary to Hong Kong.
Hemingway (second from right) uses chopsticks in Hong Kong as a guest of British army officers.
The problem, however, was that the bar of the Hongkong Hotel was not where the story was. Gellhorn famously said, “Where I want to be, boy, is where it is all blowing up.” And that was not Hong Kong – not quite yet. But Hemingway would not be moved from the bar and so, in March 1941, Gellhorn flew to Chungking (today Chongqing), at night, freezing cold and at high altitude to avoid Japanese fighter planes.
Hemingway opted to stay in the British colony, enjoying his circle of admirers, annoying the management of the Hongkong Hotel by letting off firecrackers in his room and pushing all the furniture out into the corridor so he could teach his new gang of acolytes and drinking buddies to box. Hemingway then headed into the New Territories to hunt for pheasant in the company of Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen, who had been Sun Yat-sen’scockney bodyguard, and who was in semi-retirement in Kennedy Town. Eventually, Hemingway had to go to China proper too – but he hated it and was glad to eventually get back to the United States, describing his entire Hong Kong-China trip as an “unshakeable hangover”.
James Bond author Ian Fleming.
More positively, in 1962, writer Ian Fleming arrived in Hong Kong on a BOAC jet and started enjoying life on TheSunday Times tab. The James Bond author thought Hong Kong the “most vivid and exciting city I have ever seen” and spent plenty of time enjoying Shek O and Big Wave Bay. In his Sunday Times column, later collated as the travelogue Thrilling Cities (1963), Fleming listed the best three things about Hong Kong as: 1) food; 2) suits tailored perfectly in 48 hours; and 3) cheap cigarettes at 1s 3d for twenty.
Paul French, author of true-crime bestseller Midnight in Peking (2011), is in Hong Kong for the Hong Kong International Literary Festival
“You see I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it.”
#8
“There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.”
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you…. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
#2
“She shot very well this good, this rich bitch, this kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent. Nonsense. He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook.”
“Nick slipped off his pack and lay down in the shade. He lay on his back and looked up into the pine trees. His neck and back and the small of his back rested as he stretched. The earth felt good against his back. He looked up at the sky, through the branches, and then shut his eyes. He opened them and looked up again. There was a wind high up in the branches. He shut his eyes again and went to sleep.”
#4
“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things.”
The above cite purports to know what should/would be on Hem’s ipod. Hmm, being a skeptic, I have to ask, “How do they know?” Still we can speculate.
I see Hem listening to Sinatra. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s so 30’s and 40’s elegant. Hemingway called Josephine Baker, the African-American entertainer who emigrated to France around the same time as Hemingway was there, “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw.”
the elegant Ms. Baker
Hem claims he met Josephine Baker in Paris at the best jazz club ever called Le Jockey and that she was there one night: “tall, coffee skin, ebony eyes, legs of paradise, a smile to end all smiles. Very hot night but she was wearing a coat of black fur. She turned her eyes on me and I cut in. Everything under that fur communicated with me. I introduced myself and asked her name. “Josephine Baker,” she said. We danced nonstop for the rest of the night. She never took off her fur coat. Wasn’t until the joint closed she told me she had nothing on underneath.” (Papa Hemingway, A.E. Hotchner)
Josephine Baker
So I think we can presume that there is some great jazz on his ipod. I’ve seen photos of Papa dancing with Martha so he did enjoy music and dancing, it seems. That was the early 40’s.
In The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Harry references a 1933 Cole Porter tune called “It’s Bad for Me”. I have to think that if he referenced it, he was familiar with Cole Porter’s music and he admired it. In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris,Cole Porter is present at one of the impromptu parties all of which suggests that Cole Porter and Hem crossed paths in a good way in Paris and maybe in NY, although Hem didn’t love NY.
From Hem’s love of Cuba, I see a love of the Spanish blend with Jazz. So what do you think is on Hem’s ipod? some cat songs? Speaking of which I’m in the middle of reading Hemingway’s Cats. Loving it, honestly. There is also mention of his dogs. I’ll post on this subject some other day.
Carlos Santana
We know that Hemingway’s mother had him playing the cello–badly if he is to be believed–and I’m sure chamber music was prevalent in the Hemingway household of his youth. Perhaps, in light of Hem’s dislike of his mother, he never listened to classical music after he left the family womb.
A little Norah Jones?
I just read a great article in The Paris Review describing Hem’s work room in Cuba. He stood up to write most of the time, with Black Dog sleeping at his feet for as long as it took. I believe the standing up thing was due to his bad back from the crazy plane crashes he was in. The article describes the room in great detail down to the book cases, the desk, the shutters but no mention is made of a radio or a phonograph. I can only conclude that Hem wrote with no accompaniement. Actually, I just read that although he built himself that studio at the Finca (as part of the cat house) to write (the cats occupied the second floor, his studio was on the third floor), in actuality, he reverted to writing in the house. He missed the animals and was more comfortable there.
Hem’s great pal, A.E.Hotchner, recalls Hem liking music but does not recall him going to concerts or music events. “He did not like theater, opera or ballet, and although he liked to listen to music he rarely, to my knowledge, attended a concert or any other musicial presentation, longhair or jazz.” A.E. Hotchner Papa Hemingway Page. 28.
Still he frequented many a jazz bar with Hem in Cuba.
My life falls apart when I’m awake!
Hem liked cigars, women, booze, and pals. He was a great raconteur. I have to think that music went with it all. I see his ipod being loaded with Sinatra, Santana (if he were around then), Cole Porter, Ella Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, and Duke Ellington. What do you think? He might even go for a bit of Tim McGraw while out in Ketchum. Then again, I sure can see a bit of Parrot Head music while in Key West and Cuba. Take it away, Jimmy Buffett. Wasting away again in Margaritaville, looking for . . . . Who do you think is on Papa’s Ipod?
A new movie, Can You Ever Forgive Me, starring Melissa McCarthy, just came out. She plays a con artist and in essence a criminal who, in order to make money, spent 2 years in the early 1990’s writing forgeries of letters by the likes of Noel Coward, Hemingway, and Dorothy Parker. She then auctioned them off to collectors for quite hefty sums. The character is based on the real-life character, Lee Israel, who had originally been a New York based writer and she’d had some early successes penning biographies of Tallulah Bankhead and the game show panelist Dorothy Kilgallen. However, before she turned to fraud, she was on welfare and had no literary prospects.
It will be interesting to see which Hemingway letters she worked off of or if she simply made up things whole cloth and was able to capture his voice. She must have been good because experts at the auctions must have accepted that these were the real thing.
McCarthy, who is best known for her comedy roles, her SNL take on Sean Spicer, Bridesmaids, and similar comedies, is receiving early praise for this serious role. It could be a good movie to see over the holidays!
Dear Readers: I just read Night at Key West and it was truly great fun. It takes place in Key West in the Thirties when our main character, Simon, dispatches to Key West to solve a disappearance that becomes a murder investigation. I saw Simon as a bit of an Aaron Hotchner sidekick and a Nick Adams sort of reporter of the odd events around him. It is really a kick and Hemingway features prominently. Below is my review on Amazon and link.
I just finished reading Murder in Key West by Craig A. Hart and I enjoyed it immensely. I initially read it because Hemingway is a main fictionalized but based on reality character, and I read almost everything Hemingway-related. However, the book was wonderfully involving, funny, fun, and yes, a real mystery to figure out with trips and twists at most page turns. There’s enough Hemingway for old hands to enjoy with inside jokes about the pool in Key West and Scott Fitzgerald’s editing of The Sun Also Rises as well as fun anecdotes for readers who know nothing about Hemingway.
The writing itself is terrific. I laughed at some of the funny phrases such as “largely ineffectual energy” and “like a chihuahua watchdog” and i really enjoyed the sense of Key West in the 1930s and the small town characters at the courthouse, the police station, and the diner. It was a fun Sam Spade mystery, not too heavy (Simon the narrator is a bit of a Nick Adams persona) and I highly recommend it to mystery readers, lovers of fiction set in the ‘30s, and Hemingway fans. Great fun and good writing in one delightful package.
I finished reading Paula McLain’s new novel called Love and Ruin: A Novel.It’s the story of Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife, and begins in 1937 when she is struggling to become a war journalist – which for a woman in those days was a formidable challenge – and her meeting fortuitously or unfortunately depending upon how you look at it with Ernest Hemingway.
I enjoyed it, and to tell you the truth, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. For starters, I know too much about all of this. Second, I didn’t love The Paris Wife.
Love and Ruinfocused a great deal on the Spanish Civil War and that may become tedious for some readers. However, it truly was extraordinary that Martha Gellhorn was able to cover those sorts of stories. I didn’t feel that Paula McLain portrayed Hemingway as a villain. Since the book stopped at the end of the marriage to Hemingway while giving a wrap up, I will let all of you read more about Martha and come to your own conclusions about her. She was an extraordinary woman and while Hemingway definitely wanted her in his life more as a wife than as an independent journalist, the association was definitely beneficial to her.
Martha, discoverer of the Finca
I very much enjoyed the portions of the book about Martha’s discovery of the Finca Vigía, Hemingway’s Cuban home, and her efforts to restore it. It must have been hard for her to leave when they divorced and to know it was taken over by Mary Welsh, her successor and Hemingway’s fourth wife. I also admired (and have read this many other times) Martha’s relationship with Hemingway’s sons. It was very good. She was kind, generous, and caring toward the boys.
Hem, Martha, and boys on Safari
(That being said, she knew very well that Hemingway was married to Pauline when they began their affair but could not resist his magnetism and of course he knew he was still very much married with children.)
hem and Pauline
In reading some of the reviews on Amazon, it seems well received. I have to note that many people just don’t like Hemingway. I think that there is so much written about him but I hardly read anywhere that he had a good sense of humor, or that he was driven and a hard worker, or that he loved his first wife to the end even though he knew he’d been a poor husband, or that he loved his animals and was kind and generous to veterans, his staff, charities. Perhaps it is easier to focus on his bad points, which again are not hard to find. His drinking, his insecurities, his desire to dominate are not pretty.
Martha Gellhorn and Hemingway.
I do recommend it however as it’s good easy reading, interesting, and adds dimension and texture to Martha’s legacy.
So what do we make of this?The Bible is foolish and Hemingway’s sentences “too short.” Really? Read this and see if you agree. The below is quoting from the full article with a few comments. Check out the list directly. Best, Christine
GQ magazine: The Bible is “foolish” and “ill-intentioned”
The Bible’s been around for centuries but GQ magazine is like, eh? What’s so great about it? Instead of Scripture, it has a fiction recommendation for you.
The Good Book makes the mag’s list of “21 Books You Don’t Have to Read.”While allowing “there are some good parts,” the post warns that it’s “repetitive, self-contradictory, sententious, foolish, and even at times ill-intentioned.” ( This is me: Click above link to see the 21 books. Lonesome Dove? Really. One of the greatest westerns ever. Also on list is The Old Man and the Sea, and A Farewell to Arms. GQ goes on to suggest alternatives).
Instead, GQ suggests that instead of THE BIBLE, how about “The Notebook? by Agote Kristof, not the Nicholas Sparks book of the same name. Kritsof’s book is billed as “a marvelous tale of two brothers who have to get along when things get rough.” Ok, i have not read it and it is likely great but i am not convinced yet.
The Bible finds itself in the company of works by J.D. Salinger, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway on the list of books GQ is just not that into. “Catcher in the Rye” is dinged as being “without any literary merit whatsoever.” “Huckleberry Finn” is tedious, meandering and hamfisted. Hemingway’s sentences? Too short.
Even Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” makes the roster of books to skip. (Click on it and link will appear. (ME: Here’s the entire list again if you missed the link above. Click on this link:, which includes contributions by various writers.
Me: I just read the whole list plus GQ’s list of what you should read instead. Hmm. i don’t agree.
![Night at Key West (A Simon Wolfe Mystery Book 1) by [Hart, Craig A.]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51PMi1RDz2L.jpg)
