After years of work, I am thrilled that my first monograph, Hemingway, Ecology and Culture: Re-reading Hemingway in the Anthropocene (ISBN: 9781350469303), will be published on October 16, 2025. Here is the book description, derived from Bloomsbury's Book Purchase page:
The Anthropocene has ushered in remarkable progress and unprecedented challenges, with ecological crises threatening all life-especially the most vulnerable. In search of new solutions in this open access book, Lay Sion Ng turns to an unexpected source: Ernest Hemingway.
Hemingway's ecological perspective is often overlooked in his work. This book expands on emerging scholarship, exploring Hemingway's non-anthropocentric view of non-human entities to offer fresh insights into the author and his nonhuman characters in his long-length fiction such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea and The Garden of Eden, as well as short stories like The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Big Two-Hearted River and A Natural History of the Dead.
Through a multidisciplinary lens-including material ecocriticism, eco-gothic, posthumanism, light/colour ecology, olfactory discourse, environmental history, and cultural ecology-Ng challenges the notion of Hemingway as merely a hyper-masculine figure. Instead, she reveals his texts as "ecological forces" that can heighten our awareness of nonhuman agency, leading us to understand our own place in this interconnected world.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.
Foreword
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Rereading Hemingway in the Anthropocene
Part I: Earth
1 The 'Rotten' Matter in A Farewell to Arms
2 The 'Roaring' Earth in For Whom the Bell Tolls
Part II: Air
3 The Ecology of Colors in The Old Man and the Sea
4 Olfactory Ethics in For Whom the Bell Tolls and Other Works
Part III: Water
5 The Ecology of Death in 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' and 'A Natural History of the Dead'
6 The Politics of Cure in The Sun Also Rises
Part IV: Fire
7 Fire Ecologies in 'Big Two-Hearted River'
8 The Elephant's Eye and the Maji-Maji War in The Garden of Eden
Conclusion: Hemingway, Ecology and Culture
Notes
Bibliography
Index
The book was also selected for inclusion in the Bloomsbury Open Collection 2025-2026!
Bloomsbury Open Collection 2025-26: https://www.bloomsbury.com/media/wbdnjoav/boc_upcoming_titles_2025-26.pdf
Bloomsbury Open Collections is a pioneering initiative that aims to make scholarly books open access immediately upon publication, at no cost to the author. This model is funded by participating libraries, which also receive exclusive benefits for their institutions. By spreading the cost across multiple organizations, Bloomsbury Open Collections ensures that a diverse range of authors can share their work with a global audience.
My monograph will be part of the Environment & Climate Change collection, one of three collections offered this year. Libraries can sign up to participate between March and November 2025, with titles due to publish from March 2026 to February 2027.
I am honored to be part of this progressive open-access initiative and look forward to contributing to the global scholarly community!
The book is available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on Bloomsbury Collection: http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350469334
To cite this book:
Ng, Lay Sion. Hemingway, Ecology and Culture: Re-reading Hemingway in the Anthropocene. Environmental Cultures, Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.
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