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The Hemingway Filesby H. K. Bush

THE ALLURE OF LITERARY LETTERS AND RARE FIRST EDITIONS CAPTURES THE IMAGINATIONS OF THREE PROFESSORS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE AND LEADS TO TRAGEDY IN THE WAKE OF

THE GREAT KOBE EARTHQUAKE OF 1995

THE ALLURE OF LITERARY LETTERS AND RARE FIRST EDITIONS CAPTURE THE IMAGINATIONS OF THREE PROFESSORS OF AMERICAN LITERA-TURE AND LEAD TO TRAGEDY IN THE WAKE OF

THE GREAT KOBE EARTHQUAKE OF 1995.

American literature, Japan, trauma, grief, coming of age, mystery, professors, American literature,

Great Kobe Earthquake

Title: The Hemingway Files Author: H. K. Bush Imprint: Blank Slate Press Pub Date: June 20, 2017 Trim Size: 5 x 8; Pages: 300 Paperback ISBN: 9781943075324 | Price: $15.95 E-Book ISBN: 9781943075331| Price: $9.99 Contact: For ordering inquiries: orders@midpointtrade.com | 212-616-2022For media inquiries: info@amphoraepublishing.com | 314-606-7981

Published by Blank Slate Press, an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group 4168 Hartford Street | Saint Louis, MO 63116 | 314.606.7981

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A professor of English at Saint Louis University, a former Fulbright Senior Scholar in Freiburg, Germany and a Senior Fellow at Waseda Institute in Tokyo, H.K. Bush is most noted for his work as a scholar of Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Prof. Bush has authored numerous books including Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age (2007) and American Declarations (1999). In addition, he has written in popular venues such as Books & Culture, Christian Century, The Cresset, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, among others and is also founder and contributing editor for the Heithaus Haven on-line blog community.

The Hemingway Files is his first novel.To contact Prof. Bush, send him an email at bushhk@slu.edu. For more information visit his website at halbush.com.

Janie Chang, author of Dragon Springs Road

A young American professor accepts a prestigious post in Japan, only to wonder whether he’s being manipulated by a wealthy collector of literary treasures. In a gripping story both nuanced and layered, H.K. Bush creates a fable of literary obsession, longing, and the allure of the unknowable.

An English professor receives a mysterious package with several smaller packages within it, including a manuscript, from a recently deceased former student The manuscript tells the former student’s story--a story he had never revealed to anyone. As a newly-minted Ph.D. from Yale, Jack Springs, ended up in Kobe, Japan circa 1992, where he encountered a mysterious Japanese professor of American literature, named Goto. Goto came from a family of wealth and power and was a clandestine collector of literary rarities, manuscripts, and books.Through a series of meetings, Goto provided Jack with a systematic set of revelations about Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and other literary giants, all of which were supported by unknown documents in Goto’s possession. With the allure of these revelations, as well as Goto’s beautiful niece, Jack was drawn back to Goto’s house again and again until the tragic events on the day of the Great Kobe Earthquake of 1995 threatened to destroy all that had been revealed.

A MYSTERIOUS PACKAGE LEADS TO LITERARY TREASURE AND TRAGEDYThe Hemingway Files, by H. K. Bush, available June 20, 2017

St. Louis, MO — Blank Slate Press, an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group, announces The Hemingway Files, H. K. Bush’s debut novel, will be published June 20, 2017. The Hemingway Files is available for pre-order at retailers and online in paperback for $15.95 and as en e-book for $9.99. The Hemingway Files is a story within a story, set in the halcyon days before the Great Kobe Earthquake of 1995.

One cold day in 2011 an English professor receives a package from an old student containing his final words and the story of a lifetime. The Hemingway Files takes the professor to Kobe, Japan circa 1992, where a newly minted PhD student, Jake Springs, encountered a mysterious Japanese professor of American literature, named Goto. The second son of a family of immense wealth and power, Goto was a clandestine collector of literary rarities, manuscripts, and books. Through a series of meetings, Goto provided Jack with a systematic set of revelations about Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and other literary giants, all of which were supported by unknown documents in Goto’s possession. With the allure of these revelations, as well as Goto’s beautiful niece, Jack was drawn back to Goto’s house again and again until the tragic events on the day of the Great Kobe Earthquake of 1995 threatened to destroy all that had been revealed—including Jack’s sense of who he was and what he was capable of.

About the AuthorH.K. Bush is a professor of English at Saint Louis University, a former Fulbright Senior Scholar in Freiburg, Germany and a Senior Fellow at Waseda Institute in Tokyo. He is most noted for his work as a scholar of Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Prof. Bush has authored numerous books including Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age (2007) and American Declarations (1999). His recent books include Continuing Bonds with the Dead (2016) and The Letters of Mark Twain and Joseph Twichell (2017). In addition, he has written regularly in popular venues such as Books & Culture, Christian Century, The Cresset, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, among others and is also founder and contributing editor for the Heithaus Haven on-line blog community. The Hemingway Files is his first novel. Find out more at halbush.com.

About Amphorae Publishing Group Amphorae Publishing Group is an independent publisher located in Saint Louis, Missori. Amphorae publishes trade fiction, literary fiction, young adult, and children’s books through its three imprints: Blank Slate Press, Walrus Publishing, and Treehouse Publishing Group. Amphorae Publishing Group is open to submissions through its website at amphoraepublishing.com.

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For more information, contact Lisa Miller at 314-606-7981; info@amphoraepublishing.com. High-res image of the book cover is available here. High-res image of author available here.

Amphorae Publishing Group

Questions and Answers with H. K. Bush

The Hemingway Files mixes English literature with Japanese culture – what was your inspiration?

My main inspiration was living and working in Japan for close to four years total; com-bined with inhabiting the academic world for the better part of my working life. Living in Kobe, the setting for most of the novel, it was my third full year in Japan, and I felt like a real veteran. I knew a little of the language and felt completely at home there. While teaching at Konan University in Kobe, they actually had an old departmental library just like the one in the novel, a place nobody visited. I went there often and sat for hours and hours alone, surrounded by and browsing through the first editions of great authors from before and after the Second World War. I was tempted to steal a few of those, but never did! Actually, I read a lot of Japanese novels in those days, and found so much beauty in the works of authors like Natsume Soseki, Kawabata Yasunari, Endo Shusaku, and Mishima Yukio (the “Hemingway of Japan”). Natsume’s novel Kokoro had a huge influence on the key relationship of my story, Jack and Sensei. I also met so many outstanding scholars of American literature in Japan over the years, including not a few who were more passion-ate about authors like Hemingway and Mark Twain than any Americans I knew.

What did you do to research for this book?

My main area of expertise is 19th- and 20th-century American literature, so I’ve been working on these topics for most of my career. But I needed to go deeper into the his-tory of Hemingway scholarship and biography, in particular. It’s quite a journey, and the questions continue about this iconic genius. I also looked into the life of Ezra Pound and how he ended up in Venice. Another interesting rabbit trail that caught me was the story of Henry James in Italy and his encounter with old legends about obsessive collectors, which he turned into The Aspern Papers.

You have a background in English and American literature and have written numerous books. When did you decide to start writing fiction? Why?

I’ve always dreamed of writing a novel, and actually my original dream was to become a novelist and turn the novels into screenplays for feature films. I worked very hard to publish numerous books and articles over the years, in pursuit of tenure, promotion, and prestige in the field. But there was always something missing. Finally realizing I had ac-complished about everything I want to in the world of research, other projects emerged, and I had the time and opportunity to pursue them. I actually wrote a large chunk of The Hemingway Files while serving as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Freiburg Germany. This is a terrific location that makes a brief appearance in the book. So timing, passion, and the wonderful blessings of the Fulbright Commission all came together to kick start a project I have long wanted to do.

Questions and Answers with H. K. Bush

(continued)What is your favorite part of The Hemingway Files? What did you enjoy writing about the most? Why?

I think I really enjoyed the relational aspect of the work. Jack’s contact with his mentor, Martin Dean, is entirely by mail for most of his life after undergraduate work. Jack then builds another relationship in Japan, this one with a rather mysterious and quirky, older pro-fessor whose hobbies of collecting become mesmerizing to Jack. I enjoyed working out the slow process of Jack and Sensei becoming close friends. But there are limits to how far that can actually go.

In terms of plot, I admit that the beginning in which a mysterious package arrives and the final long section in which an older academic too set in his ways must face a new experience to reach his destination, means a lot to me. I love the way the story ends (but no spoiler alerts!): the last several pages and the sense of legacy that might come from our continuing bonds with those characters, especially with Jack and Sensei.

Finally, in this book I narrate many of the scenes with a cinematographer’s eye in mind. The lush, exotic feel of southern Japan is something I really wanted to capture in this book: tiny seafood restaurants, hiking in the majestic mountains, the sudden storms, the endless serv-ings of tea and rice crackers in old wooden houses, the tedium of those humid, Japanese ac-ademic settings, the winsome high school students all dressed in uniforms, the blast of neon in the central districts of major cities, the sheer joy of hearing trains passing through on there way to some unknown destination, or of ship horns bellowing up the slopes from the port of Kobe below. I wanted to capture my own amazed sense of enigmatic, foreign beauty that I recall from my own first days in Japan.

You were a Senior Fellow at the Waseda Institute in Tokyo, how long did you live in Japan? Do you ever think you will return?

My first stay was as a teacher for the Ministry of Education, and I lived my first year in Saita-ma, which is sort of the New Jersey suburb of Tokyo to its north. Many residents of Saitama spend three or even four hours per day on crammed trains, commuting into central Tokyo. The next year I moved into Tokyo itself, taught for Otsuma University, and took on numerous private and corporate lessons, often spending 2-3 hours per day riding those same crammed trains and subways. But I loved pretty much every minute of every one of those days. Later, my wife and I also spent one year in Kobe at Konan University in the mid-90s. Kobe is a huge seaport in southern Japan, within an hour train ride of Osaka and Kyoto, so I became quite familiar with that area. Most of The Hemingway Files is set in and around Kobe. Later, I was at Waseda for a semester in spring 2012. It’s a phenomenal setting, just north of Shinjuku in Tokyo, one of the busiest and most colorful entertainment districts. But it felt like we were living in a small university town, though we were minutes away from the bustle of downtown. Finally, my wife Hiroko hails from Kyushu, the large, sub-tropical southern island, so I was fortunate to spend many long vacations and summers lounging around the hot springs culture of that luminous and idyllic land. So yes, we often return to visit Japan, and in some fantasy world I might like to retire there!

What do you ultimately want readers to take away from reading The Hemingway Files?

Each reader brings so much to a book, and each will take away something different. I do want to illustrate and impart some fascination with the great American writers, many of whom are either mentioned in the book or, like Hemingway, Mark Twain, or Herman Melville, become important in the story. That fascination has been one of the defining sensibilities of my own life. I also wonder about the effects of the digital world on our culture, including our students. Will they grow up in a world where writing letters, and keeping them through the years, is disappearing? Will caring deeply about books as artifacts, or authors as central to our identities, become extinct? In addition, I want to have my readers fall as deeply in love with Japan as I did, in those first two years when I arrived all dewey-eyed from the Great Midwest.

Where can readers find out more about you and your work?

My website is a good place to start: halbush.com. My university page has a lot of my publications listed, including my books: https://www.slu.edu/english-department/faculty/harold-k-bush-phd. And for the truly frisky, my email address is bushhk@slu.edu.

Questions and Answers with H. K. Bush

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