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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.

Sonny Boy by Al Pacino

From one of the most iconic actors in the history of film, an astonishingly revelatory account of a creative life in full

To the wider world, Al Pacino exploded onto the scene like a supernova. He landed his first leading role, in The Panic in Needle Park, in 1971, and by 1975, he had starred in four movies—The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon—that were not just successes but landmarks in the history of film. Those performances became legendary and changed his life forever. Not since Marlon Brando and James Dean in the late 1950s had an actor landed in the culture with such force.

But Pacino was in his midthirties by then, and had already lived several lives. A fixture of avant-garde theater in New York, he had led a bohemian existence, working odd jobs to support his craft. He was raised by a fiercely loving but mentally unwell mother and her parents after his father left them when he was young, but in a real sense he was raised by the streets of the South Bronx, and by the troop of buccaneering young friends he ran with, whose spirits never left him. After a teacher recognized his acting promise and pushed him toward New York’s fabled High School of Performing Arts, the die was cast. In good times and bad, in poverty and in wealth and in poverty again, through pain and joy, acting was his lifeline, its community his tribe. 

Sonny Boy is the memoir of a man who has nothing left to fear and nothing left to hide. All the great roles, the essential collaborations, and the important relationships are given their full due, as is the vexed marriage between creativity and commerce at the highest levels. The book’s golden thread, however, is the spirit of love and purpose. Love can fail you, and you can be defeated in your ambitions—the same lights that shine bright can also dim. But Al Pacino was lucky enough to fall deeply in love with a craft before he had the foggiest idea of any of its earthly rewards, and he never fell out of love. That has made all the difference.

Vote for your favorites in our Summer Art Contest


It’s time to vote for winners in this year’s Books & Books @ The Studios Summer Art Contest. Vote for your favorite canvas online or in-person. The top three entries will be featured on special edition bookmarks.

See the work and vote in-person in the Zabar Project Gallery on the first floor of The Studios of Key West now through Oct. 31st.

Many of the canvases are available for purchase. Contact The Studios of Key West if you’re interested in purchasing one of the entries.

CLICK HERE TO VOTE NOW

Entitlement by Rumaan Alam

“A brilliant exploration of extreme wealth and how it bends the lives of those close to it… Alam keeps things crystal clear and speedway fast.”
The Boston Globe

“Should come with an undertow warning.”
—Louise Erdrich

“Like having a vise slowly tightened around my heart.”
—Charles Yu


A novel of money and morality from the New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind

Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?

Taut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination.

Rage by Lester Fabian Brathwaite

A debut book from Entertainment Weekly writer and former Out magazine editor Lester Fabian Brathwaite, Rage is a darkly comedic exploration of Blackness, queerness, and the American Dream, at a time when creative anger feels like the best response to inequality.

One romantic hopeful had greeted Lester Fabian Brathwaite on a dating app with this gem: “You into race play?” Being young, queer, gifted, and Black, Lester has found that his best tool for navigating American life is gallows humor. If you don’t laugh, you cry—or, you summon your inner rage. With biting wit, Lester’s book Rage interrogates all the ways that systemic racism and homophobia have shaped our society. All to pose that proverbial question: Can a gurl live?

Rage is one part memoir, one part cultural critique, one part live grenade. He contrasts his tragic-comedic love life with the ideals he had formed from bingeing (straight, white) Hollywood depictions. And he is quick to side-eye the misogyny and internalized homophobia that some people reveal in statements like “masc for masc” on dating profiles. Lester also dives deep into representations of queer life from RuPaul’s Drag Race to The Birdcage (Robin Williams was a snack in Versace), and explores our cultural understanding of Black genius through stories of James Baldwin, Whitney Houston, and Nina Simone.

Lester’s razor-sharp voice, coupled with his searing social commentary on topics such as dating, rejection, racism, sexuality, identity, and more, offer an increasingly divided world an engaging and original read.

Bone Whispers by Rosalind Brackenbury

Nessa, now in her seventies, is back in England from the US to take care of her inherited house on the coast of Dorset. She arrives to hear news of human bones—a woman’s bones—dug up on the beach, after a cliff fall. As she walks the paths of her childhood again, memories begin to return.  Whose bones are these? Why does she have the growing feeling that they are connected with her? How does the present echo the past?  What place do guilt and recrimination take in her present life—and who, apart from her childhood love, Ted, can help her find the truth of what really happened?   

The Vacation by John Marrs

“John Marrs’s creative, high-concept thrillers never fail to keep me furiously turning the pages.”–Sarah Pearse

“John Marrs can do no wrong.” –Jack Jordan

“John Marrs is a master of suspense.” –Jeneva Rose

How far would you run to escape your past?

Venice Beach, Los Angeles. A paradise on earth. Tourists flock to the golden coast and the promise of Hollywood. But for eight strangers at a beach-front hostel, there is far more on their minds than an extended vacation. All of them are running from something. And they all have secrets they’d kill to keep…

The Final Curtain by Keigo Higashino

From the acclaimed author of Malice and Newcomer, a confounding murder in Tokyo is connected to the mystery of the disappearance and death of Detective Kaga’s own mother.

A decade ago, Tokyo Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga went to collect the ashes of his recently deceased mother. Years before, she ran away from her husband and son without explanation or any further contact, only to die alone in an apartment far away, leaving her estranged son with many unanswered questions.

Now in Tokyo, Michiko Oshitani is found dead many miles from home. Strangled to death, left in the bare apartment rented under a false name by a man who has disappeared without a trace. Oshitani lived far away in Sendai, with no known connection to Tokyo – and neither her family nor friends have any idea why she would have gone there.

Hers is the second strangulation death in that approximate area of Tokyo – the other was a homeless man, killed and his body burned in a tent by the river. As the police search through Oshitani’s past for any clue that might shed some light, one of the detectives reaches out to Detective Kaga for advice. As the case unfolds, an unexpected connective emerges between the murder (or murders) now and the long-ago case of Detective Kaga’s missing mother.

The Final Curtain, one of Keigo Higashino’s most acclaimed mysteries, brings the story of Detective Kaga to a surprising conclusion in a series of rich, surprising twists.

The Maniac – Benjamin Labatut

Don’t be fooled by the title, or its listing as fiction. This is a brilliant biography of the greatest genius of the 20th century, John von Neumann, inventor of Game Theory and the modern digital computer (known by the acronym MANIAC, which his wife Clara called the JONNYAC)that was first used to design the hydrogen bomb.

Rather than taking us dryly through von Neumann’s endless accomplishments, many of which are beyond explaining to laymen, the author beguiles us with the voices of the genius’s celebrated scientific colleagues (who either loved or hated him) and his wives (who felt the same). We thus become witness not only to von Neumann’s triumphs but also his peccadillos and (in)humanity. The book is full of vignettes, from private meetings to marital quarrels, which give it a fascinating and compelling life.

He was a consultant to the Manhattan Project, drifting in from time to time and quickly solving problems other mental giants had been struggling with, and went on to a fruitful career with the U.S. Defense Department. But the problem that challenged him most was trying to generalize the process uniting biology, technology, and computer theory to explain all self-replicating phenomena, from life on earth to the possibility of machines doing the same. 

He died at only fifty-six from cancer, in 1959, in a special suite provided for him by the government at Walter Reed Hospital, surrounded by dignitaries and attendants, hoping to catch the last pearls of wisdom from the fruitful mind of this singular polymath. 

When asked what it would take for a machine to think and behave like a human being, he said it would have to “understand language, to read, to write, to speak. And it would have to play like a child.” But his death preceded the development of the truly powerful computers of today (still operating on the fundamental principles of MANIAC) that are doing just that. The very first project of DeepMind, a leading Artificial Intelligence machine, was playing Go, the game universally acknowledged to be the most intellectually difficult, and beating its human master. (The book concludes with a dramatic blow-by-blow description of this five game challenge match.)

When asked how he could bring together his ideas on computers and self-replicating machines with those on the brain and mechanisms of thought, he offered: “Cavemen created gods, I see no reason why we shouldn’t do the same.”

Don’t miss this book if you’re interested in biography, science or even science-fiction, because both were part of von Neumann’s world.” – George, store co-founder