Boxing with Hemingway

by David Hyde Robbins

How much must a writer sacrifice of himself for the ghost of his genius? Quentin Flynn moved from Greenwich Village to Paris on a quest for a talent that had plagued him through his feckless, yet successful career as a pulp novelist. Through his search to find a new literary style, he finds Sarah Feldman, a painter and commercial artist. She is at first a kindred spirit, but then becomes his muse-not so much for his writing, but for something else lacking in his life: how to feel love. He reaches his bottom to finally realize that he had been competing only with himself. As Quentin attempts to climb from the abyss of his self-doubts, Sarah retreats into a discovery of her own through her hidden affection for Hannah, a successful artist in Vienna.

Set in the mid-1920s in Montparnasse, along with cameos of Vienna, Berlin, Florence, and Hollywood, Quentin brushes shoulders with Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Director Tod Browning, and Isadora Duncan, among others.