Hemingway’s Passions: His Women, His Wars, and His Writing by Nancy W. Sindelar

A provocative and unique look at how the women Hemingway loved shaped this literary legend

Ernest Hemingway’s passion was writing, and he was inspired by a lifetime of daring adventures and encouraged by the many women in his life. He nurtured his creativity by purposely seeking dangerous situations to test his own levels of courage and to create literary heroes who displayed grace under pressure. His masculine, adventurous spirit appealed to women of all ages, including four wives and a long list of legendary actresses, and he frequently transformed the women in his life into memorable fictional characters.

In 1950, Hemingway told Marlene Dietrich that he truly loved only five women. Who were these women and why did he love them? Some of them may have included his wives–Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh–but there were others too, among them Agnes von Kurowsky. Through quotations from his works and personal letters, as well as more than sixty photographs–many of which have not been previously published–Hemingway scholar Nancy W. Sindelar captures Hemingway’s life and romantic adventures, revealing his own feelings about his romantic relationships and the ways his experiences with women appear in his literary works.

Much has been written about Hemingway, but to date no book has linked the women he loved to his written work. The stories of Hemingway’s romantic relationships reveal not only the influence these women had on his writing but also his personal ambition, heartbreak, and literary triumphs and trials. Sindelar’s provocative analyses of Hemingway’s literature give fresh insight into the life of a legendary author, outdoorsman, adventurer, and lover.

Includes 60 photographs, many never previously published.

2024 Art Contest Winners

Congratulations to the winners of our 8th Annual Art Contest!

Online Winners –
“Under the Sea” by Karen Maxey
“My Heart Lives in Key West” by Jennifer Stephens

In-Person Vote Winner –
“Climate Change” by Kevin Assam

And our Grand Prize Winner with the most combined votes is…
“Ernie on the Swing” by Mollie Petrinec

Mollie’s work will stay on display at the store through the end of the year.

Look for all 4 designs on limited edition store bookmarks in the near future!

Thank you to everyone who submitted art and everyone who voted.

Last year’s winners.

The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins

“The best Paula Hawkins yet by a tense and haunting mile.” Lee Child

“An atmospheric, stylish puzzle box of a thriller… truly exceptional.”  Liz Moore, New York Times bestselling author of The God of the Woods

“A masterful exploration of the nature of obsession…I loved it.” Angie Kim, New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls and Miracle Creek

The propulsive and powerful new novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train

Welcome to Eris: an island with only one house, one inhabitant, one way out. Unreachable from the Scottish mainland for twelve hours each day.

Once home to Vanessa: A famous artist whose notoriously unfaithful husband disappeared twenty years ago.

Now home to Grace: A solitary creature of the tides, content in her own isolation.

But when a shocking discovery is made in an art gallery far away in London, a visitor comes calling.

And the secrets of Eris threaten to emerge….

A masterful novel that is as page-turning as it is unsettling, The Blue Hour recalls the sophisticated suspense of Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith and cements Hawkins’s place among the very best of our most nuanced and stylish storytellers.

“Atmospheric and marvelously twisty.” Danya Kukafka, author of Notes on an Execution

“Reminiscent of du Maurier: art, islands, missing spouses … Hard to put down.”  Mick Herron

“A masterpiece! Gorgeous and chilling.” Shari Lapena

Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah by Charles King

From New York Times bestselling historian and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Charles King, the moving untold story of the eighteenth-century men and women behind the making of Handel’s Messiah

“A delicious history of music, power, love, genius, royalty and adventure.”—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The World

“A book of power and glory, brimming with emotion and dazzling in its reach.”—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra and The Revolutionary

George Frideric Handel’s Messiah is arguably the greatest piece of participatory art ever created. Adored by millions, it is performed each year by renowned choirs and orchestras, as well as by audiences singing along with the words on their cell phones.

But this work of triumphant joy was born in a worried age. Britain in the early Enlightenment was a place of astonishing creativity but also the seat of an empire mired in war, enslavement, and conflicts over everything from the legitimacy of government to the meaning of truth. Against this turbulent background, prize-winning author Charles King has crafted a cinematic drama of the troubled lives that shaped a masterpiece of hope.

Every Valley presents a depressive dissenter stirred to action by an ancient prophecy; an actress plagued by an abusive husband and public scorn; an Atlantic sea captain and penniless philanthropist; and an African Muslim man held captive in the American colonies and hatching a dangerous plan for getting back home. At center stage is Handel himself, composer to kings but, at midlife, in ill health and straining to keep an audience’s attention. Set amid royal intrigue, theater scandals, and political conspiracy, Every Valley is entertaining, inspiring, unforgettable.

The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny

The 19th mystery in the #1 New York Times-bestselling Armand Gamache series.

Relentless phone calls interrupt the peace of a warm August morning in Three Pines. Though the tiny Québec village is impossible to find on any map, someone has managed to track down Armand Gamache, head of homicide at the Sûreté, as he sits with his wife in their back garden. Reine-Marie watches with increasing unease as her husband refuses to pick up, though he clearly knows who is on the other end. When he finally answers, his rage shatters the calm of their quiet Sunday morning.

That’s only the first in a sequence of strange events that begin THE GREY WOLF, the nineteenth novel in Louise Penny’s #1 New York Times-bestselling series. A missing coat, an intruder alarm, a note for Gamache reading “this might interest you”, a puzzling scrap of paper with a mysterious list—and then a murder. All propel Chief Inspector Gamache and his team toward a terrible realization. Something much more sinister than any one murder or any one case is fast approaching.

Armand Gamache, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his son-in-law and second in command, and Inspector Isabelle Lacoste can only trust each other, as old friends begin to act like enemies, and long-time enemies appear to be friends. Determined to track down the threat before it becomes a reality, their pursuit takes them across Québec and across borders. Their hunt grows increasingly desperate, even frantic, as the enormity of the creature they’re chasing becomes clear. If they fail the devastating consequences would reach into the largest of cities and the smallest of villages.

Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank by Justene Hill Edwards

A leading historian exposes how the rise and tragic failure of the Freedman’s Bank has shaped economic inequality in America.

In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman’s Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only nine years after it opened, their trust was betrayed and the Freedman’s Bank collapsed.

Fully informed by new archival findings, historian Justene Hill Edwards unearths a major turning point in American history in this comprehensive account of the Freedman’s Bank and its depositors. She illuminates the hope with which the bank was first envisioned and demonstrates the significant setback that the sabotage of the bank caused in the fight for economic autonomy. Hill Edwards argues for a new interpretation of its tragic failure: the bank’s white financiers drove the bank into the ground, not Fredrick Douglass, its final president, or its Black depositors and cashiers. A page-turning story filled with both well-known figures like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Jay and Henry Cooke, and General O. O. Howard, and less well-known figures like Dr. Charles B. Purvis, John Mercer Langston, Congressman Robert Smalls, and Ellen Baptiste Lubin. Savings and Trust is necessary reading for those seeking to understand the roots of racial economic inequality in America.

Brothers by Alex Van Halen

In this intimate and open account—nothing like any rock-and-roll memoir you’ve ever read—Alex Van Halen shares his personal story of family, friendship, music and brotherly love in a remarkable tribute to his beloved brother and band mate.

Told with acclaimed New Yorker writer Ariel Levy Brothers is seventy-year-old drummer Alex Van Halen’s love letter to his younger brother, Edward, (Maybe “Ed,” but never “Eddie”), written while still mourning his untimely death.

In his rough yet sweet voice, Alex recounts the brothers’ childhood, first in the Netherlands and then in working class Pasadena, California, with an itinerant musician father and a very proper Indonesian-born mother—the kind of mom who admonished her boys to “always wear a suit” no matter how famous they became—a woman who was both proud and practical, nonchalant about taking a doggie bag from a star-studded dinner. He also shares tales of musical politics, infighting, and plenty of bad-boy behavior. But mostly his is a story of brotherhood, music, and enduring love.

“I was with him from day one,” Alex writes. “We shared the experience of coming to this country and figuring out how to fit in. We shared a record player, an 800 square foot house, a mom and dad, and a work ethic. Later, we shared the back of a tour bus, alcoholism, the experience of becoming successful, of becoming fathers and uncles, and of spending more hours in the studio than I’ve spent doing anything else in this life. We shared a depth of understanding that most people can only hope to achieve in a lifetime.” 

There has never been an accurate account of them or the band, and Alex wants to set the record straight on Edward’s life and death. 

Brothers includes never-before-seen photos from the author’s private archives.

Life Form by Jenny Slate

From actor, comedian, co-creator of Marcel the Shell, and New York Times bestselling author of Little Weirds, Jenny Slate, a wild, soulful, hilarious collection of genre-bending essays depicting the journey into motherhood as you’ve never seen it before.

What happened was this: Jenny Slate was a human mammal who sniffed the air every morning hoping to find another person to love who would love her, and in that period there was a deep dark loneliness that she had to face and befriend, and then we are pleased to report that she did fall in love, and in that period she was like chimes, or a flock of clean breaths, and her spine lying flat was the many-colored planks on the xylophone, but also she was rabid with fear of losing this love, because of past injury. And then what happened was that she became a wild-pregnant-mammal-thing and then she exploded herself by having a whole baby blast through her vagina during a global plague and then she was expected to carry on like everything was normal—but was this normal, and had she or anything ever been normal?

Herein lies an account of this journey, told in five phases—Single, True Love, Pregnancy, Baby, and Ongoing—through luminous, laugh-out-loud funny, unclassifiable essays that take the form of letters to a doctor, dreams of a stork, fantasy therapy sessions, gossip between racoons, excerpts from an imaginary olden timey play, obituaries, theories about post-partum hair loss, graduation speeches, and more.

No one writes like Jenny Slate.

Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2024:
The New York Times, Washington Post, New York Magazine, TIME, Kirkus, Literary Hub, Goodreads

The surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series—and the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.

When the Southern Reach trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestseller list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.

And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast—before Area X was called Area X—had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem?

Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. There are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.

What’s going on with book banning?

Our banned books display
Our banned books display

Updated Oct. 2024, find out more about Unite Against Book Bans.

Updated Sept. 2024: PEN American has released new information for Banned Books Week 2024. Read more at https://pen.org/banned-books-week-2024.

Though book censorship is a national concern (see graphic for national book ban numbers) – our display focuses on books that have been banned (removed from public schools and/or libraries) or challenged (targeted for removal) in Florida.

Book Ban stats from Unite Against Book Bans.

Number of unique titles challenged 2021-2023:
1,858 - 2021
2,571 - 2022
4,240 - 2023

According to PEN America Florida, “Florida now ranks first in the nation and accounts for more than 40% of all documented [book] bans.”

It might not seem like removing or restricting titles in schools or public libraries is a huge problem, after all you can purchase them here and from many other stores. But book censorship has real and significant effects on readers (many of them young people) who may only have access to these books via schools and libraries – places that are readily accessible and free.

And it’s important to consider whose stories are being restricted or removed. According to the American Library Association, “47% of the books targeted for censorship were titles representing the voices and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals.”

Want to learn more?

PEN America Florida: https://pen.org/region/florida

National Coalition Against Censorship: https://ncac.org

The American Library Association’s Unite Against Book Bans Campaign: https://uniteagainstbookbans.org

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