A selection of the greatest sentences by the master, Ernest Hemingway.
Sentences that can take a reader's breath away and are not easily
forgotten. Each sentence has been selected and examined by authors such
as Elizabeth Strout, Sherman Alexie, Paula McLain, and Russell Banks;
filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick; Seán Hemingway, A. Scott Berg, and
many others in this celebration and conversation between Hemingway and
some of his most perceptive and interesting readers.
"All you have to do is write one true sentence," Hemingway wrote in his
memoir, A Moveable Feast. "Write the truest sentence that you know."
If that is the secret to Hemingway's enduring power, what sentences
continue to live in readers' minds? And why do they resonant? The host
and producer of the One True Podcast have gathered the best of their
program (heard by thousands of listeners) and added entirely new
material for this collection of conversations about Hemingway's truest
words.
From the long, whole-story-in-a-sentence line, "I have seen the
one-legged streetwalker who works the Boulevard Madeleine between the
Rue Cambon and Bernheim Jeunes' limping along the pavement through the
crowd on a rainy night with a beefy red faced episcopal clergyman
holding an umbrella over her.", to the short, pithy line that closes
The Sun Also Rises, "Isn't it pretty to think so?", this is a
collection full of delights, surprises, and insight.
"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really
happened," wrote Hemingway. "And after you're finished reading one, you
will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards, it all belongs
to you." For readers of American literature, One True Sentence is full
of remembrances--of words you read and the feelings they gave you. For
writers, this is an inspiring view of an element of craft--a single
sentence--that can make a good story come alive and become a great
story.
