A father takes out a newspaper advertisement for his estranged son — all is forgiven — and eight hundred young men named Paco come to the meeting place. Elliott Stearns takes Hemingway’s story, and the life behind it, into what a father actually supplies.

A series on John 3 opens with the man rather than the verse. Elliott Stearns reads Nicodemus closely, down to a conjunction in verse one most readers miss, and traces an exchange that never returns to the terms Nicodemus arrived with.