Reading Hemingway's the Sun Also Rises

The first volume in an important series of guides to the works of Ernest Hemingway

“The Reading Hemingway series of guides to Ernest Hemingway’s major works of fiction, short stories, and novels are written for students, fellow teachers, and other readers who share an interest in the works of one of America’s, and indeed the world’s, outstanding writers…. The books in this series will gloss or annotate, page by page, word by word, if necessary, like a good guidebook to a city or country. These books will not tell Hemingway readers what to think and feel about an action, a character or a place. Rather, the guides point out features and details possibly overlooked or misunderstood by the ‘visitor.’ … These books, side by side with Hemingway’s books, may enrich one’s reading ‘tours.’”―from the Foreword

 Designed as an exercise in close reading, this first volume in the series is grounded in narrative and aesthetic concerns, addressing history, local knowledge, actual and symbolic landscape and inscape, and every aspect of the seven-eighths of the story that lies beneath the surface―the submerged iceberg of the fiction. Author H. R. Stoneback equips the reader to sound its depths and take full measure of the novel’s allusiveness, indirection, and understatement. Navigating the labyrinthine text of The Sun Also Rises, Stoneback negotiates its intricate, complex, and interconnected passages and leads the reader ultimately to the center of Hemingway’s vision.

H.R. Stoneback, professor of English and director of Graduate Studies at the State University of New York at New Palz, is author of Hemingway’s Paris: Our Paris? and Singing the Springs and Other Poems and a former member of the Board of Directors of the Hemingway Society and has been a Senior Fulbright Scholar in China, a visiting professor of American Literature at the University of Paris, and the director of the American Center for Students and Artists in Paris.