A Moveable Feast

This 2006 recording is the closest we can get to time-traveling back to Paris in the 1920s, a place where great art, beautiful women, and literary lions like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound compete for the attention of an ambitious young Hemingway. Narrator James Naughton guides the reader with a relaxed cadence and a nonjudgmental tone through a series of colorful vignettes and fascinating insights, bringing just the right mix of confidence and warmth--yes, this is one of the few works of Hemingway with warmth, as well as affection and humor. This is a wonderful way to rediscover the man who altered twentieth-century literature. R.W.S. [Editor's Note: A soundreview is available at Audiopolis, www.audiofilemagazine.com] (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

Few listeners are likely to remember what the real Ernest Hemingway sounded like, so it's hard to imagine many would take issue with John Bedford Lloyd as a convincing substitute. Everything one imagines Hemingway to be is present in Lloyd's performance: the rock-solid certainty of conviction, the passion toward cause and person, the hunger for experience, and the alertness to pain--his own and that of others. These are Hemingway's newly edited remembrances of Paris in the 1920s, when his confidence as a writer soared and he was briefly satisfied as a young husband and father. It was also when his acquaintances included other literary lions: Joyce, Fitzgerald, Pound, and Gertrude Stein. With Lloyd ably filling in for the author, youth could hardly seem more intoxicating and full of promise. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine