The Importance of Not Being Ernest: My Life with the Uninvited Hemingway (A unique Ernest Hemingway biography, Gift for writers)

"...illuminates his life and works in ways not seen before." --Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award winner and author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through

#1 New Release in Historical Latin America Biographies

Discover Hemingway's biography through the eyes of a fellow author and journalist. New York Times bestselling author of Salt, Mark Kurlansky turns his historical eye to the life of Ernest Hemingway. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, The Importance of Not Being Ernest shows the huge shadow Hemingway casts.

The perfect gift for writers. By a series of coincidences, Mark Kurlansky's life has always been intertwined with Ernest Hemingway's legend, starting with being in Idaho the day of Hemingway's death. The Importance of Not Being Ernest explores the intersections between Hemingway's and Kurlansky's lives, resulting in creative accounts of two inspiring writing careers. Travel the world with Mark Kurlansky and Ernest Hemingway in this personal memoir, where Kurlansky details his ten years in Paris and his time as a journalist in Spain--both cities important to Hemingway's adventurous life and prolific writing.

Paris, Basque Country, Havana and Idaho. Get to know the extraordinary people he met there--those who had also fallen under the Hemingway spell, including a Vietnam veteran suffering from the same syndrome the author did, two winners of the Key West Hemingway look-alike contest, and the man in Idaho who took Hemingway hunting and fishing.

In this unique gift for writers, find:

• A memoir full of entertaining and illuminative stories
• Little-known historical facts about Hemingway's life
• Anecdotes about those who suffer from what the Kurlansky calls "hemitis"

Readers of Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley in Search of America, or The Boys will love The Importance of Not Being Ernest.

Mark
Kurlansky was born in Hartford, Connecticut. After
receiving a BA in Theater from Butler University in 1970--and refusing to serve
in the military--Kurlansky worked in New York as a playwright, having a number
of off-off Broadway productions, and as a playwright-in-residence at Brooklyn
College. He won the 1972 Earplay award for best radio play of the
year.

He has worked many other jobs, including as a
commercial fisherman, a dock worker, a paralegal, a cook, and a pastry
chef.

In the mid-1970s, unhappy with the direction New York
theater was taking, he turned to journalism, an early interest--he had been an
editor on his high school newspaper. From 1976 to 1991 he worked as a foreign
correspondent for the International Herald
Tribune, the Chicago Tribune,
the Miami Herald, and The
Philadelphia Inquirer. Based in Paris and then Mexico, he reported
on Europe, West Africa, Southeast Asia, Central America, Latin America, and the
Caribbean.

His articles have appeared in a wide variety of
newspapers and magazines, including the International Herald
Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer,
the Miami Herald, the Chicago
Tribune, the Los Angeles
Times, Time, Partisan
Review, Harper's, The
New York Times
Magazine, Audubon, Food
& Wine, Gourmet, Bon
Apetit,
and Parade.

He is a member of
Phi Beta Kappa. In addition to numerous guest lectures at Columbia University
School of Journalism, Yale University, Colby College, Grinnell College, the
University of Dayton, and various other schools, he has taught a two-week
creative writing class in Assisi, Italy; led a one-week intensive non-fiction
workshop in Devon, England for the Arvon Foundation; and guest lectured all
over the world on history, writing, environmental issues, and other subjects.
In spring 2007, he was the Harman writer-in-residence at Baruch College, teaching
a fourteen-week honors course titled "Journalism and the Literary
Imagination."

He has had 35 books published including
fiction, nonfiction, and children's books. His books have been translated into
twenty-five languages and he often illustrates them himself.