Will I love In Our Time?

I love this book because it forced me to take sharp notice of Hemingway.

No, it wasn’t the big novels, the ones that had become best-sellers; they were everywhere. But when this book fell into my lap, it made me want to dig right into him. It’s his earliest collection of stories, and though Hemingway said once that they were interconnected, critics then and now disagree.

I think they’re great because they show the early manifestations of what he coined “the iceberg theory” of good writing—writing that forced me, one day, standing in a bookstore, reading the last few pages… show more.

Nobody likes Ernest Hemingway these days, but In Our Time is one of the great novels, not just of this remarkable year but of the twentieth century.

Hemingway was a terrible human being, as far as I can tell, and the majority of his work is terrible, too: I challenge anyone to read Across the River and Into the Trees, for instance, without becoming nauseous. It is perhaps the worst single book ever written by a prominent American author.

But this first book is brilliant, and although often seen as a collection of short stories, it is a collage-like… show more.

Hemingway can be a challenge for me—reading him, I sometimes feel I’m standing in front of a closed-door—so I rolled my eyes a bit when a mentor of mine suggested that this short story collection might help me with my own work. But boy, did I stand corrected. Through short stories and fragmentary vignettes, Hemingway paints a deeply interior portrait of a man trying to return from war. It directly inspired me to include short, emotionally intense interstitial chapters to break up the longer, meatier chapters of my novel.