One True Podcast

Stewart O’Nan, the prolific author of West of Sunset and other works of fiction and non-fiction, shares his one true sentence from “The End of Something.”

One True Podcast takes on another classic Hemingway short story as Olivia Carr Edenfield joins us to discuss “Cross-Country Snow,” the beloved Nick Adams story from In Our Time .  Prof. Edenfield discusses how this skiing trip links Nick’s past with his future, how it fits as a crucial pivot in the story cycle, the Nick-George relationship, the mysterious waitress, the wonderful description of ski...

Welcome to the twelfth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . In this episode, we discuss Hemingway's powerful depiction of a bullfighting scene between bull and horse. We start out with that famous "whack whacked" opening before turning to what might be an equally important and seriously overlooked (by us...

Welcome to the eleventh of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . Listeners might be familiar with this vignette as the short story "The Revolutionist" from Hemingway's bigger collection In Our Time published in 1925.  How does the vignette characterize the post-WWI communist revolution and its revolutionarie...

Javier Fuentes, the 2024 PEN/Hemingway winner for Countries of Origin , shares his one true sentence from "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." 

Live from Bilbao! One True Podcast presents our show live from the 20th International Hemingway Conference in Bilbao, Spain. We welcome scholars Stacey Guill and Alberto Lena to explore Hemingway’s five stories of the Spanish Civil War. These obscure, under-discussed stories – including “The Denunciation,” “The Butterfly and the Tank,” and “Landscape With Figures” – become coherent and significant...

One True Podcast welcomes the great Larry Grimes to discuss “Today Is Friday,” the curious playlet from Men Without Women about three Roman soldiers and a Jewish barman discussing Jesus’s crucifixion. This interview explores the resonance of the story and what it tells us about Hemingway’s lifelong quest for the religious experience. We discuss Hemingway’s fascination with executions, masculine Ch...

Welcome to the tenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . This chapter will be familiar to many readers as the bitter narrative that would later be presented as “A Very Short Story.” Here, this vignette is the longest in this volume. Is it also the most autobiographical? We discuss the ill-fated World War I love affair...

Welcome to the ninth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . This chapter is the first of the vignettes set in America, a fictionalized account of a cigar store robbery that Hemingway learned about in Kansas City in 1917. We discuss this sketch’s depiction of national confusion, moral ambiguity, attitudes towards immigran...

One True Podcast celebrates the publication of  Volume 6 of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway by welcoming two of its editors, Sandra Spanier and Verna Kale. These letters, spanning 1934-1936, find Hemingway in Key West, fishing, publishing Green Hills of Africa , producing his Esquire dispatches, making his famous reaction to the Florida hurricane of 1935, and negotiating the competing demands of l...

We continue our exploration of Hemingway's short stories with his masterful narrative, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." To aid us in this effort, we're joined by Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, who is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico and served as the 2022 Obama Fellow at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies. Herlihy-Mera is the author of, among other works, D...

Welcome to the eighth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . On the heels of the vignette about Nick's war injury, this bombardment scene evokes the idea that there are no atheists in foxholes while, at the same time, capturing the transactional nature of religion during wartime.  We discuss various ways this vignet...

Welcome to the seventh of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . In this important vignette, Hemingway depicts Nick's war injury and his "separate peace" with Rinaldi.  We discuss Hemingway's own wounding during WWI, key differences between the final version of the vignette and early drafts, and Young&ap...

The Spanish Civil War was a brutal and maddeningly complex historical event, with enormous repercussions on Ernest Hemingway’s life and career. To guide us through the many moving parts and frayed relationships, we welcome back Amanda Vaill to One True Podcast. Vaill’s essential book, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War , guides us through the events of the war, includin...

Julie Schumacher, author of The Dear Committee Trilogy ( Dear Committee Members, The Shakespeare Requirement , and The English Experience ), shares her one true sentence from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises . As Schumacher explores, Hemingway's short, terse writing often leads to some "long, meandering, winding roads of sentences" like the one she's chosen for this episode....

Welcome to the sixth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . The scene depicts the execution of six Greek officials toward the end of 1922.  In this episode, we discuss the history of that trial and execution, the journalistic coverage of events, and Hemingway's fictional treatment of the execution. We also relate th...

Welcome to the fifth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . This scene of a barricade and a retreat continues Hemingway's brilliant depictions of Battle of Mons. In this episode, we explore some historical aspects of that retreat, compare the narrative voice and point of view to chapter four, and much more. As alway...

The two great titans of twentieth-century American literature – Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner – never met. They corresponded only a time or two; however, they were always on each other’s minds. Their hyper-awareness of the other’s recent work led sometimes to envy, sometimes to awe, and frequently to catty comments. To help us learn more about these two men and their fraught relationship,...

This episode will focus on the Spanish Civil War and how one particular incident – the murder of accused Fascist spy José Robles – ruptured the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. To sort out the many moving parts to this chapter of Hemingway’s life, we welcome Stephen Koch, the author of The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of José Robles . Koch takes u...

Welcome to the fourth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . At 75 words, this short scene describes the Battle of Mons. To Ezra Pound, Hemingway would refer to this conflict (from August 1914 at the very beginning of the First World War) as "clear and noble." In this episode, we discuss the historical aspects...

Welcome to the third of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . In this scene, Hemingway describes the minarets rising over the landscape overlooking the harrowing evacuation at the Greco-Turkish War in 1922. Hemingway distills the vast scope of inhumanity into the expression of one scared child. We discuss how this scene in...

American modernism is a concept that is so slippery that even scholars don’t always agree on its definition. Is it a historical era, or a literary technique? Was Ernest Hemingway even a modernist? If so, which of his works are most modernistic? For this discussion, we turn to Mark Whalan, editor of the compendious new volume, Cambridge History of American Modernism , and Karen Leick, one of its co...

Mark Kurlansky, the author of dozens of books of fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature (including Cod , Salt , and The Importance of Not Being Ernest ), shares his one true sentence from Hemingway's story "In Another Country."

Welcome to the second of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . In this scene, Hemingway puts us into a chaotic bullfighting scene, with gorings, hooting crowds, and a kid who tries to save the day. We discuss how this early sketch prefigures Hemingway’s career-long fascination with the bullfight and the problem of depictin...

One True Podcast reads in our time ! Welcome to the first of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of Hemingway’s book of vignettes. Starting with the unforgettable opening salvo -- “Everybody was drunk” -- chapter one describes a kitchen corporal in a chaotic battery on the way to the Champagne during World War I.  We explore these 112 words and what they reveal about Hemingway’s experimen...