The Hemingway Files - Softcover

"A young American professor accepts a prestigious post in Japan, only to wonder whether he's being manipulated by a wealthy collector of literary treasures. In a gripping story both nuanced and layered, H.K. Bush creates a fable of literary obsession, longing, and the allure of the unknowable." - Janie Chang, author of Dragon Springs Road Fascinating. Compelling. Engaging. The Hemingway Files is all of the above and so much more. Bush knows his subjects--Whitman, Twain, Melville, Hemingway--and he threads the thin lines of fact and fiction weaving together a mysterious and truly enjoyable story. His novel teaches us about the fault-lines in our assessment of literature and in our own culture, and in doing so, he presents us with many lessons about the nuances of ourselves in relation to the literature we read and love. It is a novel that carries with it a measure of reality that is so rare in fiction these days, and with that, even in its liberally creative moments, gives us something true to hold onto and to hold steady with in the current of our modern world." - Dr. Matthew C. Nickel, author of Hemingway's Dark Night "A puzzle-box of a novel set in late twentieth-century Japan that entices and tantalizes the reader with an alluringly beautiful woman, a sagacious teacher, and a literary treasure trove that unlocks the secret to one of the great mysteries in Hemingway biography." - Dr. James Hutchisson, author of Ernest Hemingway: A New Life "This book, naturally, will cause any Professor or Teacher of Literature to start drooling like Pavlov's dogs Bierka or Chyorny which appear to have survived only in the pages of this book ... it was a pleasure to read this book; when you read it, take your time with it, as it will be over all too quickly." - Jamie Brown, author of Sakura, Constructing Fiction, Conventional Heresies, and Freeholder, --publisher

The allure of literary letters and rare first editions captures the imaginations of three professors of English literature and leads to tragedy in the wake of the Great Kobe Earthquake of 1995. An English professor receives a mysterious package with several smaller packages within it, including a manuscript, from a recently deceased former student. The manuscript tells the former student's storyaa story he had never revealed to anyone. As a newly-minted Ph.D. from Yale, Jack Springs, ended up in Kobe, Japancirca 1992, where he encountered a mysterious Japanese professor of American literature, named Goto. The second son of a family of immense wealth and power, Goto was a clandestine collector of literary rarities, manuscripts, and books. Through a series of meetings, Goto provided Jack with a systematic set of revelations about Hemingway, Ezra Pound,and other literary giants, all of which were supported by unknown documents in Goto's possession. With the allure of these revelations, as well as Goto's beautiful niece, Jack was drawn back to Goto's house again and again until the tragic events on the day of the Great Kobe Earthquake of 1995 threatened to destroy all that had been revealedaincluding Jack's sense of who he was and what he was capable of.