Youth Economy, Crisis, and Reinvention in Twenty-First-Century China: Morning Sun in the Tiny Times by Hui Faye Xiao (review)

Abstract

themselves can consult many volumes of Hemingway correspondence, particularly the Cambridge edition that Worden draws from and Princeton’s newly published annotated volumes. The creativity walks a thin line between fiction and non-fiction. Constructed “creative nonfiction” scenes (289) should not rely upon anything in Hemingway’s “creative fiction” to be wholly factual, or even to be based on fact, or assume that Hemingway’s fictional characters are Hemingway himself. At times, it surmises that his fictional characters and events are fact. For example, while we know that Ernest and Pauline did visit Frenchspeaking bootleggers in Sheridan to buy wine, his short story “Wine of Wyoming” never names Ernest as the narrator, or identifies the narrator’s companion as male or female. Ernest and several friends made multiple visits and purchases around the area before Pauline arrived. Hemingway’s fiction is a composite of dialogue, characters, and invention derived from a series of visits. Likewise derived from many sources, Cockeyed Happy’s sometimes-salty “creative non-fiction,” like a “Sloppy Rita” at Sloppy Joe’s bar, ought to be taken with a grain of salt.