Creative critics

One of the more popular canards against film critics (along with "did you see the same movie I did?" and "you don't like anything") is that they are a bunch of envious losers who attack creative people because they are incapable of creating anything themselves.

Nonsense. I personally wrote a wonderful parody of the TV series "The Man from UNCLE" a little while back which was a big hit with my 5th grade classmates. Moreover, such a statement overlooks Vachel Lindsay, James Agee, Paul Schrader, Aristotle (okay, so he didn't write about film) and the entire French New Wave, to name just a few.

And now adding to the above list is frequent "Phoenix" contributor Michael Atkinson, whose debut novel "Hemingway Deadlights"  will be published August 18 by Minotaur Press. Perhaps the first book to feature the legendary Papa as a protagonist, this is a mystery novel set in Key West in 1956 in which the aging novelist and future Nobel Prize winner sets out, Sam Spade-style,  to solve the murder of an old drinking buddy.

Preposterous, you say? Maybe not so much given a recent book that claims Hemingway was an agent for the KGB.
Be that as it may, check out the trailer for Atkinson's novel.