I’m pleased to announce my short story “Man and Beast or: Ernest Hemingway Went Fishing One Day” has been published with Flash Fiction Magazine.

Truthfully, I haven’t read much of Ernest Hemingway, but his influence on modern literature is palpable. It’s in my own writing because many of the writers I read have been influenced by his straightforwardness, his clean and often blunt prose, his unabashed chauvinism, and his uncanny ability capture the one true sentence. 

The first and only novel of his I have read is The Sun Also Rises, and I adored that book for its simplicity. It answered no questions. It gave no allusions. Yet it remains imprinted in my brain as one of those defining books. I looked at it and said, “I could do this. I could actually be a writer.” I’ve also read a bit of his memoir, A Moveable Feast, admittedly just the parts with F. Scott Fitzgerald, but in that too there was a sincerity in his prose. Yes, he was an asshole and a womanizer, and we can all very much agree on that. But there was something about the juxtaposition of his seemingly polar opposites of characters that intrigued me. He was a man who behaved reprehensibly, who was selfish and demeaning, who abused, and who refused any bullshit, and he was a man who was, deep down, scared and gentle, amused by beauty and found it only in the most bizarre of moments.

I loved this idea and wanted so much to write about it. It started with a joke, me and my brother pretending to be Hemingway, finding ardent and hardened truths out of everyday moments, like drinking whiskey or fishing. “Are we not fish ourselves?” I asked. I imagined this to be Hemingway’s truth, and so it was.

Save for his name in the title, there is no reference to Hemingway in “Man and Beast.” Rather, I wanted it to speak more of man who was old and tired and sad and paranoid and drunk, who felt his end was near, who sought solace the only way he knew how: with an old boat, a couple of bottles of whiskey, and an empty lake.

I hope you enjoy “Man and Beast or: Ernest Hemingway Went Fishing One Day”

– G.G.

Read “Man and Beast” here.

To learn more about Flash Fiction Magazine, click here.