May 2018 Meeting

This month's Hatchet Coffee book club pick is A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. We haven't read many classics or memoirs together so we wanted to diversify the types of books we've been reading. 

Here's the summary: 
Begun in the autumn of 1957 and published posthumously in 1964, Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast captures what it meant to be young and poor and writing in Paris during the 1920s. A correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921, three years after the trauma of the Great War and at the beginning of the transformation of Europe's cultural landscape: Braque and Picasso were experimenting with cubist form; James Joyce, long living in self-imposed exile from his native Dublin, had just completed Ulysses; Gertrude Stein held court at 27 Rue de Fleurus, and deemed young Ernest a member of une generation perdue; and T.S. Eliot was a bank clerk in London. It was during these years that the as-of-yet unpublished young writer gathered the material for his first novel The Sun Also Rises, and the subsequent masterpieces that followed.

Among these small, reflective sketches are unforgettable encounters with the members of Hemingway's slightly rag-tag circle of artists and writers, some also fated to achieve fame and glory, others to fall into obscurity. Here, too, is an evocation of the Paris that Hemingway knew as a young man - a map drawn in his distinct prose of the streets and cafes and bookshops that comprised the city in which he, as a young writer, sometimes struggling against the cold and hunger of near poverty, honed the skills of his craft.


A Moveable Feast is at once an elegy to the remarkable group for expatriates that gathered in Paris during the twenties and a testament to the risks and rewards of the writerly life.

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We are so excited to talk about this book together and share our own stories about our experiences with Hemingway's works and knowledge about his life. 

You can get your copy of the book at the bookstore for $16 but you'll always get 15% off book club titles. You can also purchase the book from us in other formats online:

Digital Audiobook
Hardcover
Paperback
eBook
Audio CD

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We will meet at the Hatchet Coffee lounge on Thursday, May 31 at 7:30pm. There will be free wine & snacks for book club members. Please attend even if you weren't able to finish the book or if you didn't like it--some of our best conversations have been when the group is divided. As always, we welcome new members with open arms. See y'all at the end of the month!