A month ago I went on a book-buying orgy at Kinokuniya (a massive and excellent Japanese bookstore) during their annual sale. Among other things, I bought By-Line, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades.
The book is a 500 page anthology of dispatches he wrote as a journalist. It's terribly entertaining because many of the articles aren't more than two pages long, yet the prose he paints is far beyond the corrugated cardboard five-w's fare you read in an AP/UPI dispatch. They're more like single espresso distillations of what could be novels. I've only read perhaps twenty dispatches (30 pages of text) so far, but I'm addicted, and look forward to each little break that gives me opportunity to pull another.
Here's a short excerpt from "Old Constan" (The Toronto Daily Star, October 28, 1922)
"If it doesn't rain in Constan the dust is so thick that a dog trotting along the road that parallels the Pera hillside kicks up a puff like a bullet striking every time his paws hit the ground."
Posted by Nils Blutig at September 12, 2002 11:42 PM | TrackBack