Happy holidays from One True Podcast, and it wouldn’t be the holiday season without Suzanne del Gizzo—the celebrated editor of The Hemingway Review—here to discuss another one of Hemingway’s seasonally appropriate works. In previous years, we have talked together about “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” “Christmas on the Roof of the World,” “The Christmas Gift,” and “A North of Italy Christmas.” This year, we explore “The Blind Man’s Christmas Eve,” an article Hemingway wrote for The Toronto Star in December 1923.

With Suzanne, we place the story in its historical and biographical contexts, delve into the relationship between the main character and the curious narrative perspective, examine how physical and metaphorical blindness works in the story, and connect the story to other Hemingway works such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," "Get a Seeing-Eyed Dog," and Islands in the Stream. We also think about the importance of the song “My Old Kentucky Home,” which the main character hears an Italian organ grinder play.

As a special gift to our listeners, we begin the episode with a reading of “The Blind Man’s Christmas Eve” by former guest Mackenzie Astin, star of The Facts of Life, The Magicians, and In Love and War, where he played the young Henry Villard opposite Chris O’Donnell’s Hemingway and Sandra Bullock’s Agnes von Kurowsky. We also end the episode with another treat--a moving rendition of "My Old Kentucky Home" by Hemingway scholar Michael Kim Roos, who appeared as a guest on one of our previous shows on A Farewell to Arms.

Thanks for another great year, everybody. Enjoy!

Welcome to the seventeenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

Hemingway captures a scene out of the American newspapers, the execution by hanging of an Italian-American mobster, Sam Cardinella. We discuss Hemingway’s career-long treatment of executions and the behavior of those facing death, along with the detached behavior of those administering punishment. We parse out the discrepancy of a vocabulary word, and we also analyze the eventual placement of this episode into the dreamscape of a young Nick Adams. The power of this chapter represents one of the great achievements of this book.

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

Ruchika Tomar, the 2020 PEN/Hemingway winner for A Prayer for Travelers, shares her one true sentence from “A Very Short Story.”

Welcome to the sixteenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

In this episode, Maera is gored and dies in a masterfully cinematic way. We explore Hemingway's description of the bullfighter's death and speculate about why Hemingway decided to kill off his character "Maera" when the real bullfighter was still alive when in our time was published. We also draw comparisons between this vignette and other Hemingway works like "A Banal Story" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and consider its important placement in the later short story sequence of 1925.

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

Welcome to the fifteenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

This episode on Maera and Luis extends Hemingway’s exploration of bullfighting and violence. We begin by discussing the narrator's identity, how it is revealed in the story, and why that matters; by the end of the episode, we focus attention on the final lines of the vignette ("Yes. Yes. Yes.), exploring the relationship between Hemingway's work and Molly Bloom's soliloquy that ends James Joyce's Ulysses. Throughout the episode, we're fascinated by the triangulation of the narrator, Maera, and Luis and how it structures this curious vignette.

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

As One True Podcast winds down its ambitious year-long project of devoting an episode to each of the eighteen chapters in in our time, we visit with the man who wrote the book about the book, Milton A. Cohen.

Cohen’s study of the Paris in our time, Hemingway’s Laboratory, is a keen guide through the sketches and analyzes Hemingway as a writer finding his voice. In our interview with Cohen, he describes Hemingway’s artistry, the innovations he sees in the vignettes, some of his favorite moments in the book, and even things Hemingway left out from the manuscript.

Join us as Milton A. Cohen guides us through in our time!

Robert W. Trogdon joins One True Podcast to share the treasures of the new Library of America volume he has edited: A Farewell to Arms and Other Writings, 1927-1932. We discuss Hemingway and his life during those magical, turbulent years, and also the great work he produced.

From his second short story collection, Men Without Women to his second novel, A Farewell to Arms, to the unexpected turn his career takes, the bullfighting treatise titled Death in the Afternoon, Trogdon guides us through these works and these eventful years. Trogdon also discusses the various textual issues he faced while editing this volume, including the expletives of A Farewell to Arms, an inverted paragraph that nobody knew about, and Hemingway’s vision for the bullfighting photographs in Death in the Afternoon.

Join us as we discuss the second Hemingway offering from the Library of America with its editor!

Welcome to the fourteenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

This episode continues Hemingway’s exploration of bullfighting and violence through a study of Nicanor Villalta. In two short paragraphs, Hemingway masterfully captures the movement of matador and bull, leading up to the pivotal image where "Villalta became one with the bull." We discuss how Hemingway depicts good vs. bad bullfighters; we consider the stylistic function of so many present participles in the vignette; and we touch on connections to The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon, and Across the River and Into the Trees.

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!