HEMINGWAY'S SUITCASE

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. Hardcover. Fine/Near Fine. In the past few years there has been a revival of interest in the writing of MacDonald Harris, the pseudonymn used by Donald Heiney, sailor, writer and academic, in his fiction. This late novel was published in 1991, only two years before Heiney's death. In 1922, a young Hemingway lost or had stolen from him in a Paris train station a suitcase containing the unpublished manuscripts of nearly everything he had written up to then. The suitcase and its contents were never found. A half-century later, in Los Angeles, an elderly man just returned from Europe, shows his son, Alan, a struggling literary agent, some stories he claims are from Hemingway's suitcase, and asks for help in pulbishing them. Thus begins Alan's attempt to learn what is false, what is real. Are the stories Hemingway's or clever forgeries? The novel contains five of these stories, a kind of challenge to the readers. First printing, first edition (with complete numberline). About 5 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches, 288 pages in grey paper-covered boards with maroon backstrip and gold lettering on spine. The pictorial dustjacket's front panel shows the Eiffel Tower propping up the lid of an open suitcase overflowing with pages of manuscripts. Back panel contains blurbs praising the author's writing as "imparting a sense of mystery with every page." "a thinking man's novelist." This is a very fine, "as new" copy. Complete, clean and unmarked. No tears, creasing or bumping. Not ex-library or remaindered. Dustjacket shows a bar code sticker in the lower corner of back panel and very minimal surface and edge wear. Not price-clipped. It isn't perhaps unusual to notice something of Michael Chabon's sense of magic and the absurd in this work, since Chabon was a student of Heiney in California.