William Faulkner has long been considered the great racial interrogator of the early-twentieth-century South. In Drawing First Blood, author Marc Kevin Dudley suggests that Ernest Hemingway not only shared Faulkner’s racial concerns but extended them beyond the South to encompass the entire nation. Though Hemingway wrote extensively about Native Americans and African Americans, always in the back of his mind was Africa. Dudley sees Hemingway’s fascination with, and eventual push toward, the African continent as a grand experiment meant to both placate and comfort the white psyche, and to challenge and unsettle it, too.

The contributors to Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory employ an intriguing range of approaches to Hemingway’s work, using the concept of memory as an interpretive tool to enhance understanding of Hemingway’s creative process. The essays are divided into four sections— Memory and Composition, Memory and Allusion, Memory and Place, and Memory and Truth—and examine The Garden of Eden, In Our Time, The Old Man and the Sea, Green Hills of Africa, Under Kilimanjaro, The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast, A Farewell to Arms, and Death in the Afternoon, as well as several of Hemingway’s short stories.

In 1996 René Villarreal returned to Cuba to retrieve his memoir of his life with Ernest Hemingway at the Finca Vigia. Sadly, he learned that the manuscript and photographs had been lost. Determined to tell his story, Villarreal, together with his son Raúl, set about rewriting the account of how he came to be Ernest Hemingway’s majordomo, confidant, and friend—his Cuban son.

This first volume in the new Teaching Hemingway Series is a collection of richly nuanced, insightful, and innovative essays on teaching A Farewell to Arms from authors with varied backgrounds, including all levels of secondary and higher education. Read separately, the essays contribute to an enhanced understanding and appreciation of this master work. These seasoned instructors offer practical and creative classroom strategies, sample syllabi, and other teaching tools. Contributors include J. T. Barbarese, Brenda Gaddy Cornell, Peter L. Hays, Jennifer Haytock, Ellen Andrews Knodt, Any Lerman, James H. Meredith, Kim Moreland, Jackson A. Niday II, Charles M. (Tod) Oliver, Mark P. Ott, David Scoma, Gail D. Sinclair, Tom Strychacz, Frederic Svoboda, and Lisa Tyler.

The Lousy Racket is a thorough examination of Ernest Hemingway’s working relationship with his American publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, and with his editors there: Maxwell Perkins, Wallace Meyer, and Charles Scribner III. This first critical study of Hemingway’s professional collaboration with Scribner’s also details the editing, promotion, and sales of the books he published with the firm from 1926 to 1952 and provides a fascinating look into the American publishing industry in the early twentieth century.

In Hemingway and French Writers, Ben Stoltzfus illuminates the connections between Hemingway and the most important French intellectuals, such as Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry de Montherlant, André Malraux, and Albert Camus. A distinguished scholar of both French literature and Hemingway studies, Stoltzfus compares Hemingway’s major works in chronological order, from The Sun Also Rises to The Old Man and the Sea, with novels by French writers. While it is widely known that France influenced Hemingway’s writing, Hemingway also had an immense impact on French writers. Over the years, American and French novelists enriched each other’s works with new styles and untried techniques. In this comparative analysis, Stoltzfus discusses the complexities of Hemingway’s craft, the controlled skill, narrative economy, and stylistic clarity that the French, drawn to his emphasis on action, labeled “le style américain.”

The first volume in this new series is Reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, by H. R. Stoneback. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway’s first big novel, immediately established him as one of the great prose stylists and preeminent writers of his time. It is also the book that encapsulates the angst of the post–World War I generation, known as the “Lost Generation.” This poignant story of a group of American and English expatriates on an excursion to Pamplona represents a dramatic shift in Hemingway’s ever-evolving style. Featuring Left Bank Paris in the 1920s and brutally realistic descriptions of bullfighting in Spain, the story is about the flamboyant Lady Brett Ashley and the hapless Jake Barnes in an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions.

At the center of this evolution is the contention that Hemingway’s preoccupation with and scientific study of life in the Gulf Stream moved his theory and practice of writing away from the Paris art circle of the 1920s to the new realism of the 1950s. A Sea of Change explores the importance of Hemingway’s relationship to the waters of the Gulf Stream that transformed his imaginative work.

In what became The Garden of Eden, Hemingway’s character David Bourne identifies his writing process as the creation of a new, forbidden country, asking himself the questions that drove Hemingway’s own writing, “So where do you go? I don’t know. And what will you find? I don’t know. The bones of the others I suppose.” Justice’s investigations into Hemingway’s creative method illuminate the map of Hemingway’s forbidden country, revealing his writing as a lifelong simultaneous expression of present and past. Justice locates the power of Hemingway’s fiction in this duality—in the paradoxical compulsions toward destruction and creation, lamentation and hope, and fear and love.

Under Kilimanjaro is the last of Hemingway’s manuscripts to be published in its entirety. Editors Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming believe that “this book deserves as complete and faithful a publication as possible without editorial distortion, speculation, or textually unsupported attempts at improvement. Our intent has been to produce a complete reading text of Ernest Hemingway’s manuscript. . . .Working on it was both a privilege and a responsibility. . . .Readers of this remarkable work will experience the mingled pleasure of revisiting the familiar and discovering the new.”