If living the bohemian lifestyle is about creating, than it would be reductive to dismiss the crusty guy selling newspaper clip art outside of Prospect Park on principle. Dismiss him for making crappy art, sure. True, Hemingway and Baldwin probably benefited from the community of artists that they interacted with, but Emily Dickinson never left her room. Where you are might not hurt, but it might not help much either. What you do matters more. 

The truth is, Zelda has become the stuff of myth.  It’s no surprise, then, that St. Martin’s Press has just released Z, A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, by Therese Anne Fowler.  It’s a daunting enterprise, putting words in Zelda’s mouth, imagining her rich emotional life, whether jumping in a fountain in Washington Square, pinioned against a wall by Ernest Hemingway in a supposed sexual assault, painting watercolors from within sanitarium walls, or listening in bed to a husband’s cobbled dreams that may involve a sexual tryst with the same Hemingway.

Julian Barnes knows France—its culture, cuisine, topography—and its curious relationship to England. In an earlier book, Something to Declare, and in his new collection, Through the Window, France and the French are either in the forefront or background of many of these witty, piercing and erudite essays. Whether he’s tracing the influence of the French countryside on Ford Madox Ford, analyzing the complexities of translation or offering a fresh look at Rudyard Kipling, Barnes delivers valuable insights into a culture and people who have risen above the desperate inequities of the past century:

Throughout the works of Russian writers, like Tolstoy and Chekhov, the characters drink vodka like there is no tomorrow, and also wine, as in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Mead, the delicious honey wine first created by the ancients, played a significant role in Beowulf, with Beowulf, the hero, defending the king’s mead hall against the terrifying beast, Grendel. In works like Steinbeck’s classic moral tale, The Pearl, the featured drink of choice is pulque, a beverage made from the maguey plant’s fermented sap. 

There is perhaps no name more widely renowned in modern American literature than Hemingway. The Hemingways after Ernest continue to intrigue both those well-acquainted and those less familiar with his work. The continued fascination with the Hemingway name  poses a question: What  do we expect from the children of fame? Though we prize family traditions (Francis Ford and daughter Sofia Coppola), we are equally compelled by differences (Gloria Vanderbilt and son Anderson Cooper). Do genetics predetermine greatness or is upbringing to blame?