Spent a quick hour or so during my lunchbreak yesterday fumigating my brain with cigar smoke (a Petrus if you must know) and reading Coffee With Hemingway, one of a clever series from the UK's Duncan Baird Publishers that are Q&A's with a handful of historical figures. The series of $10, 5½" x 4½" hardcovers currently sports eight titles described as  "fictional dialogues based on biographical facts" with an eclectic group of celebrities. Besides Don Ernesto, there are volumes on The Buddha, Marilyn Monroe, Michelangelo, Mozart, Plato, Oscar Wilde, and the one, the only, Groucho. The Hemingway volume was created by Kirk Curnutt, an English prof at Troy University in Montgomery, AL, and a board member of the EH Society and Foundation.

I've been a Hemingway aficionado for 20 years and have plowed through just about every major biography on him during that time (Michael Reynolds' series is the best) as well as several novels using him as a character and read and reread his work regularly. Like all diehards, I have my own image of what he was like as a guy sitting on the stool next to you sipping his suds and shooting the sh, er, breeze. Curnutt's image understandably is more academic than my own, but, nonetheless, pretty damn close, so the book was great fun. Curnutt also scored an intro by none other than nice guy John Updike, making the book all the more pleasurable.

If Hemingway isn't your cup, try one of the others. I mean, come on, who doesn't like Groucho?