I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.’ And what to say of Hemingway's prose style! Read it when you are tired of pomo excesses- his sentences are easy on the eyes & on the brains too! He satirises the pseudo-intellectualism of his detractors in Banal Story. It is this behaviour, the behaviour of these men sitting in judgment over another man, that bothers me. It is their words, recounting the story for the narrator and his friend, who are drinking their beers at the end of a long skiing season, that make me shudder. To pass judgment as they do is hurtful to a living man. It drives him from the inn. It makes him skulk off to the Löwen for another drink, lonely and bereft, but he is "the beast" who doesn't care for another human being enough to suit these soft men in their soft inn.

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.

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The peasant and his wife lived a hard life. We know that. And he was an ex-soldier who'd likely witnessed some terrible things. Both of these experiences would have altered death for the man and necessarily pushed the pragmatic over the spiritual for him. I can see that he's a fantastic writer, but I don't think he's a very good story-teller. Not yet, anyway.

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees. they’re not all of the same calibre. the stories all hit differently, yet remain of a whole. a collection of little truths told through fiction. i also find maile meloy (a wonderful contemporary writer) does something very similar with her short stories. she can bypass your critical radar because it feels like something that really did occur, in credit to the subtly of it all. The Undefeated, In Another Country, Hills Like White Elephants, The Killers, Che Ti Dice La Patria?, Fifty Grand, A Simple Enquiry, Ten Indians, A Canary for One, An Alpine Idyll, A Pursuit Race, Today is Friday, Banal Story, Now I Lay Me. Themes and subject matter range from bullfighting, boxing, and prizefighting to divorce, infidelity, and death. Critics at the time praised Hemingway’s concise language and powerful prose. 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.P.S. To make up for this insipid review,I'm sharing here a must-read interview,where,in his irrepressible style,Hemingway holds forth on a variety of subjects: Hills Like White Elephants”, is a dialogue between two people, that is the whole story. You read what he says, what she says, and know there is a hidden meaning behind the conversation, but don’t know exactly what it was. I read it, and re-read it and couldn’t figure it out. I ran to the internet and looked it up. I had the “Aha moment”! It all made sense after it was spelled out for me; very interesting short story dialogue. I liked this story the best.