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Books

How can we know what dead people want?

7 April 2018

9:00 AM

7 April 2018

9:00 AM

In 1999, Patrick Hemingway published True at First Light, a new novel by his father Ernest. In his role as literary executor of the late writer’s estate, Patrick edited an unfinished manuscript of some 200,000 words down to a more marketable ‘fictional memoir’ of less than half that length. The book hit the bestseller lists but received largely negative reviews, most notably from Joan Didion in the New Yorker.

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