One True Podcast

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 skiing, how the story reflects Hemingway’s biography of the mid-1920s … and that curious title.

This episode on “Cross-Country Snow” is the latest installment of One True Podcast’s ambitious project to tackle every Hemingway short story. Join us for this latest effort! 

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!) part of the story. In addition, we read this vignette in light of Hemingway's remarks about gored horses from The Sun Also Rises and Death in the Afternoon. Just as with previous vignettes, we also focus time on the last sentence and why the chapter ends the way it does.

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

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 revolutionaries as well as counter-responses in Hungary, Italy, and Switzerland? Why does the narrator seem to fixate on classical painters, particularly the work of Mantegna? What are the connections between this story and other Hemingway works like A Farewell to Arms? In this episode, we respond to these questions and many more as we delve into a vignette that often gets glossed over! 

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

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 as our guests explore their roots in Spanish culture and history as well as Hemingway’s own life.

We learn about Hemingway’s perspective about the war, the way the stories set the groundwork for For Whom the Bell Tolls, his focus on “dignity” in the stories, and the ambiguity of his endings. This conversation will inspire you to visit or revisit these narratives, armed with the context Guill and Lena provide.

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 Christianity, and hybrid religions. We also explore how the 3rd Roman Soldier unexpectedly emerges as one of the great characters of Hemingway’s short fiction.

“Today Is Friday” continues One True Podcast’s ambitious project of tackling every Hemingway short story. Join us for this latest effort! 

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 between our hero and Ag (later Luz), doomed due to an insurmountable age gap, our hero’s bad attitude, the presence of smooth-talking Italians, and an ocean in between them. Hemingway turned the early trauma of a Dear John letter into this raw, painful self-examination that attempted to exorcise his own experiences. In this episode we also explore how this chapter provides a fascinating precis of this relationship’s fuller articulation in A Farewell to Arms.

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

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 immigrants, and how Hemingway’s specific language renders a complex scene. Through our conversation, the subtle division emerges between Drevitts and Boyle and how Hemingway’s characters are able to say things without stating them.

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

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 life, art, business, and celebrity.

We discuss Hemingway’s relationships with his correspondents: Arnold Gingrich of Esquire, Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s, Jane Mason, critic Ivan Kashkin, John Dos Passos, and more.

Join us as we visit once again with the Hemingway Letters team to explore Hemingway’s letters from these crucial years!

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, Decolonizing American Spanish.

In this conversation, we examine key dynamics between the major characters in this very short story. Along the way, we ponder the various religious and existential themes that emerge as well as the bilingual nature of the story and how to read and appreciate the story in translation.

Join us as we meet up with two waiters and an old man in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."