Ernest Hemingway

THE SEVERAL LIVES OF JOSEPH CONRAD
By John Stape
Pantheon, 369 pages, $30

Asked by Ford Maddox Ford to contribute to a memorial supplement to the Transatlantic Review in honor of the recently deceased Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway groused about friends who disparaged Conrad; he complained that most of the people he knew thought Conrad a bad writer and T. S. Eliot a good one. Papa disagreed: “If I knew that by grinding Mr. Eliot into a fine dry powder and sprinkling that powder over Mr. Conrad’s grave, Mr. Conrad would shortly appear … and commence writing, I would leave for London early tomorrow morning with a sausage grinder.”  read more »

This seems to be the season for new plays by dead writers, according to the New York Sun. Mark Twain's Is He Dead?, a comedy written in 1898, was exhumed and adapted by David Ives for the Broadway stage. Now Ernest Hemingway is getting his due. The off-Broadway Mint Theater is mounting the first "faithful" production of The Fifth Column, the only play by Mr. Hemingway.  read more »

Eater today takes a look inside Chumley's—er, more specifically, the seemingly eternal construction site once known as Chumley's.

Last month, The Observer checked in with longtime proprietor Steve Shlopak, whose optimistic forecasts for reopening the crumbled Greenwich Village watering hole keep getting pushed back.  read more »

City inches toward approving wrecked Village watering hole’s restoration.  read more »