Join us for the second of three installments of One True Book Club ’26! In this series of episodes, we are reading the Hemingway-relevant selection, Under Fire by Henri Barbusse, the classic French WWI novel published in 1916.

This episode covers chapters 10-19 of the novel. We discuss how Barbusse finds moments of unexpected humanity amidst the carnage of warfare and his subtle characterization of the platoon, including the narrator himself. We also cover his metafictional “Swear Words” chapter, where Barbusse reflects on a Realist writer attempts to describe the indescribable.

We also connect this brutal novel to Hemingway’s writing, to other modernist works, to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried… and even to The Shawshank Redemption.

We are using the Penguin Classics edition with an Introduction written by future One True Podcast guest, Professor Jay Winter.

In this episode, we welcome Julia Cooke to discuss her new book, Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World, which profiles three pioneering women journalists: Rebecca West, Emily "Mickey" Hahn, and Martha Gellhorn.

Cooke explores these writers' shared temperament and celebrates their work as a forerunner to New Journalism. Throughout our interview, we learn about Gellhorn: her life before Hemingway entered the scene (in a letter, she would describe her younger self as "starry and restless”), her short-lived relationship with Hemingway, and her later years in which she adopted a son and experienced a rather complicated motherhood. Cooke also immerses us in Gellhorn's writing, focusing on how her war journalism weaves together harrowing scenes with humanizing details and how her witnessing of Dachau toward the end of WWII was truly transformative.

One True Podcast does its part to help your summer reading lists by covering a book that is not by Hemingway, but is Hemingway-relevant: Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire, the 1916 World War I novel that Frederic Henry and Count Greffi name-drop so provocatively in between sips of icy cold champagne and smoothly fluent billiards shots.

This episode covers the first nine chapters of Under Fire, where we discuss why Hemingway damned this novel with such faint praise in his Men at War anthology, how the episodic structure might remind readers of a contemporary work like The Things They Carried, the absence of instantly recognizable characters, and – controversially – whether there’s more rain in this novel or in A Farewell to Arms. One True Podcast is never one to shy away from the divisive topics.

We hope you’ll join us in this summer’s long-overdue read of Under Fire. We are using the Penguin Classics edition with an Introduction written by future One True Podcast guest, Professor Jay Winter.