In a detective story set against the backdrop of Hemingway's Cuba, the discovery of the skeletal remains of the victim of a forty-year-old murder on the Havana estate of Ernest Hemingway, draws ex-cop Mario Conte back into the game to investigate a crime with roots in Hemingway's Cuba four decades earlier.
''A Farewell to Arms'' is Hemingway's classic set during the Italian campaign of World War I. The book, published in 1929, is a first-person account of American Frederic Henry, serving as a Lieutenant ("Tenente") in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. It's about a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the First World War, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations. The publication of ''A Farewell to Arms'' cemented Hemingway's stature as a modern American writer, became his first best-seller, and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as "the premier American war novel from that debacle World War I."
In more than 30 novels, several short stories, graphic novels, movies, plays and poems, Ernest Hemingway has been introduced or "appropriated" as an important fictional character. This book is an inquiry into that phenomenon from various perspectives--including that of fan fiction--and deals with such questions as what, if anything, this biographical fiction adds to the dialogue about America's best known and most talked about writer.
"Padura’s Heretics spans and defies literary categories . . . ingenious." —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air A sweeping novel of art theft, anti-Semitism, contemporary Cuba, and crime from a renowned Cuban author, Heretics is Leonardo Padura's greatest detective work yet. In 1939, the Saint Louis sails from Hamburg into Havana’s port with hundreds of Jewish refugees seeking asylum from the Nazi regime. From the docks, nine-year-old Daniel Kaminsky watches as the passengers, including his mother, father, and sister, become embroiled in a fiasco of Cuban corruption. But the Kaminskys have a treasure that they hope will save them: a small Rembrandt portrait of Christ. Yet six days later the vessel is forced to leave the harbor with the family, bound for the horrors of Europe. The Kaminskys, along with their priceless heirloom, disappear. Nearly seven decades later, the Rembrandt reappears in an auction house in London, prompting Daniel’s son to travel to Cuba to track down the story of his family’s lost masterpiece. He hires the down-on-his-luck private detective Mario Conde, and together they navigate a web of deception and violence in the morally complex city of Havana. In Heretics, Leonardo Padura takes us from the tenements and beaches of Cuba to Rembrandt’s gloomy studio in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, telling the story of people forced to choose between the tenets of their faith and the realities of the world, between their personal desires and the demands of their times. A grand detective story and a moving historical drama, Padura’s novel is as compelling, mysterious, and enduring as the painting at its center.
Cuban writer Iván Cárdenas Maturell meets a mysterious foreigner on a Havana Beach who is always in the company of two Russian wolfhounds. Ivan quickly names him 'the man who loves dogs'. The man eventually confesses that he is the man who murdered Leon Trotsky in Mexico.
The subject of endless biographies, fictional depictions, and critical debate, Ernest Hemingway continues to command attention in popular culture and in literary studies. He remains both a definitive stylist of twentieth-century literature and a case study in what happens to an artist consumed by the spectacle of celebrity. The New Hemingway Studies examines how two decades of new-millennium scholarship confirm his continued relevance to an era that, on the surface, appears so distinct from his—one defined by digital realms, ecological anxiety, and globalization. It explores the various sources (print, archival, digital, and other) through which critics access Hemingway. Highlighting the latest critical trends, the contributors to this volume demonstrate how Hemingway's remarkably durable stories, novels, and essays have served as a lens for understanding preeminent concerns in our own time, including paranoia, trauma, iconicity, and racial, sexual, and national identities.