Fitzgerald thought it was strong but suffered from excessive throat-clearing (Hemingway cut out a chunk of the beginning at his suggestion). His mother thought it was a filthy book (and that her son was probably in need of more church-time). His agent thought the book was elaborately alive. He knew that a lot was riding on this novel. Towles does make an excellent point in the midst of all this bookkeeping, one that readers, especially readers encountering the book for the first time, are well-served to remember: when he wrote this book, Hemingway “had yet to experience the potentially compromising effects of fame, wealth, and recognition.” The tanned, brawny young man carousing with his friends and lovers in the Latin Quarter in 1926 had had good (although not good enough for him) notices for his short stories, but he had not yet fully created the Hemingway theater.

You start to feel like you need an abacus. Dalloway, and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy – we find that Hemingway is using sentences that are half the length of his peers’, averaging fewer than ten words versus about twenty.” “Jake makes eight stops at which he drinks nine kinds of alcohol …” “In the course of the novel, Jake crosses seven different bridges …” and so on. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. “If we compare The Sun Also Rises to three important novels published in 1925 – F.

The edition includes an Introduction by bestselling novelist Amor Towles, and it’s oddly statistical, like finding a new edition of The Custom of the Country with a Preface by Bill James where he industriously totes up the hansom fares. The Penguin Classics Deluxe volumes are always visually outstanding, and this latest one is a fine addition to the line. The book itself is a lovely trade paperback with deckled edges and French flaps, a joy in the hand, with artwork by Kikuo Johnson on every surface: men and women talking, drinking, kissing, the allure of a woman’s throat, and, of course, the bright red flare of the matador’s muleta. In the new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of The Sun Also Rises, readers get one of those two.

And the second is that almost every one of those new editions will be accompanied by thought-provoking new essays on the book. The first is that it’ll occasion a veritable flood of new editions of the book: new hardcovers, deluxe illustrated or annotated editions, the kinds of mass market paperbacks it hasn’t seen in thirty or forty years, and so on. There are two main boons attending the lapsing of Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel The Sun Also Rises into the public domain in 2022.

The sun also