What a brave guy to take on such a scary/exciting/goofy deal. I am inspired to try new things!

In a deeply recursive labyrinth of irony and its handmaiden: self-loathing, the hero, the book, the author and idea all try to draw life from the corpse of a celebrity. The best phrase in the book: "kill your inner hemingway." Unfortunately, it is the best phrase in the book.

This seems to be an assiduously fleshed out premise invented in a beer haze during a literary workshop venting session...a self-referential tour de force in a mileu so exceedingly small that its only member spends all his time trying to see the back of his own head without using a mirror.

Hendersons' idea of a roman-a-clef is to disguise "Geraldo" as a character named Yugo, AND still have Geraldo in the book. Talk about killer misdirection!

The phallic obsessions reveal an undigested freudian premise despite the throwaway Jungian catch phrases. As bitterly self-deprecating as it seems to be, it still is worthy of bitter deprecation. Even hemingway, whose world was so flat that nematodes ducked when they crawled through it, doesn't get any lower.

If you really hate Hemingway, don't read this book, because you will feel genuinely sorry for the scoundral afterwards. If you like Hemingway read this book, and you will hate Henderson and his cohort of patronizing, one trick lit-flitters for their disservice to the very idea of the word, indeed.

Some very funny stuff, but the ending is weak and completely unsatisfying. Good effort at creating female characters falters in every case, and no one but the protagonist is more than a few centimeters deep.

Damn good book! Henderson masterfully epitomizes the academic love/hate relationship that must occur between the failed scholar and the great author. The protagonist, Elliot McGuire, does an excellent job of self-antagonizing over his near miss with greatness as a Hemingway scholar. McGuire believes he has finally overcome his past and wants to publish a book of his own about his new form of therapy and empowerment -- "LifeForms". McGuire's publisher lays waste to his dreams of pop psychology. Eric "Pappy" Markham claims to have killed Ernest Hemingway and has sent off a badly written 5 page teaser, outlining details of the supposed murder and claiming the reasoning behind it was that everything Hemingway had ever been was because of Pappy. McGuire's publisher can't wait to put the book (a guaranteed best selling biography!) on the market and sends him down to edit. We'll just say that "editting" takes on a whole new meaning while Pa! ppy sets off McGuire's "Hemophobia" and other bleaker aspects....

Henderson manages to take a poke at every aspect of popular culture, from best-sellers to TV talk shows to academic elitism. I found it all to be wickedly on the money. A must read!

This is simply great stuff. Henderson's protagonist, Eliot McGuire, is a recovering Hemingway scholar/alcoholic, and he's not only fallen, he's plummeted off the wagon on both counts. Stuck in the quagmire of negotiations with his publishing company for his barely cohesive life-improvement system, LifeForms, Eliot, hoping to sneak his way into their good graces, opts to do the company a quick favor by flying down to Key West to bid on the tell-all memoir by one "Pappy" Markham, a shadowy figure of the "Lost Generation" set, who claims that Hemingway died not by his own hand but rather by Pappy's shotgun, payback for plagaristic treachery supposedly committed by Hemingway long ago. Eliot soon finds that the supposed manuscript is no longer than a page, and takes the opportunity to ghostwrite this doubtful story for a quick buck. Henderson realizes the synergistic possibilities of his themes (the way men treat each other, the way the publishing world seems to mistreat everyone, the way everyone has treated Hemingway's legend to the exclusion of his real persona) and utilizes them to full effect. Bold posteuring gives way to deceitful maneuvering gives way to more success and more psychosis than Eliot ever bargained for. An incredibly fun read

A fun, witty book about an impersonator who gets "caught in a trap"--just like his idol. A lot of fun whether you're an Elvis fan or not (and I don't know which would find it funnier).