Men Without Women: Ernest Hemingway (Arrow Classic S)

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They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table. And we could have all this,’ she said. ‘And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.’ I love this story, sometimes I top-toe around it because you never know how people will react and I don’t want to push them overboard but I like it when I see groups of people in front of me, just contemplating and actually arguing about literature, forgetting that I’m in the classroom, eating candies or just writing down another theory in my Ernest Hemingway folder.

The best of these stories are among the finest in the English language: “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Killers,” “In Another Country,” “Fifty Grand,” “Now I Lay Me,” though I want to make a pitch, too, for the story of the aging bullfighter in “The Undefeated,” which has amazing passages of description, as painful as it is now for most people to see the cruelty of the slow killing of the bull. But the twin portraits of the older bullfighter and bull are powerful, in spite of that. Both are undefeated, in the way of The Old Man in the Sea. I really enjoyed this! I don't know what new I can say about Hemingway's writing that already hasn't been said, but let me try. The writing of this book was immaculate! It was elegant, easy, and it felt as if each word used in the prose had a purpose, which was soo satisfying to me. I did not want to read this book fast. I wanted to devour every word that I was presented. Yet the innkeeper and the sexton call the man "a beast" (his entire class, in fact) and laugh callously over his loss and the story that they say is "unbelievable" but gleefully recount as believable monetheless.After high school, Hemingway reported for a few months for the Kansas City Star before leaving for the Italian front to enlist. In 1918, someone seriously wounded him, who returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1922, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. The couple moved, and he worked as a foreign correspondent and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the expatriate community of the "lost generation" of 1920s. The volume consists of 14 stories, 10 of which had been previously published in magazines. It was published in October 1927. I can see that he's a fantastic writer, but I don't think he's a very good story-teller. Not yet, anyway. Hemingway's first two published works were Three Stories and Ten Poems and In Our Time but it was the satirical novel, The Torrents of Spring, that established his name more widely. His international reputation was firmly secured by his next three books; Fiesta, Men Without Women and A Farewell to Arms.

It may be blasphemous to many, but this collection was in the latter camp, hence it took me a long time to read a very short book. I just couldn't engage with the characters, plots (I hate bullfighting and boxing, which set me against a couple of them) or writing style, the latter being mostly such short sentences that it was almost like reading a child's book. In other hands, such sentences might be pleasingly spare, but here, they just annoyed me. The girl looked at the bead curtain. ‘They’ve painted something on it,’ she said. ‘What does it say?’

This influential 14-story collection includes some of the Nobel laureate’s most notable short fiction, including “Hills Like White Elephants” and “Fifty Grand,” which a Cosmopolitan editor praised as “one of the best short stories that ever came to my hands.” Read by an Earphones Award–winning narrator.

Cheerfully this was not the case and Ernest existed, sometimes belligerently one suspects, in a time when the only required eau de toilette pour homme was testosterone. The stories in this book reflect this, with each character reduced to the raw brutal essence of what it means to be a man; in the bullring, at the end of a gun, in war at the wheel of a car or in the arms of a woman. Men Without Women was variously received by critics. Cosmopolitan magazine editor-in-chief Ray Long praised the story "Fifty Grand", calling it, "one of the best short stories that ever came to my hands...the best prize-fight story I ever read...a remarkable piece of realism." [4] Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899. His father was a doctor and he was the second of six children. Their home was at Oak Park, a Chicago suburb. Each story within this small book had a message and each message was pretty darn dark and sad, but poignant.

Baker, Carlos (1972). Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (4thed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01305-5. isbn:0691013055. You’ve got to realize,’ he said, ‘ that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.’ I get that there was lots of symbolism and big themes in these little nuggets, but for me, there are more enjoyable ways to consider them.