The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway - The Finca Vigia Edition

I read a lot of these short stories. Mostly they are about stoic men drinking and either killing other people, getting killed, killing themselves, remembering a death, or being witness to some death of something.

I hadn't expected such a fat book--too fat to hold in your hands to read. Too much information that I don' t care about. I just wanted the stories.
If I had seen it in a book store I would not have bought it.

Reading this book was like studying the Hemingway ego as a therapist. The stories were wonderfully descriptive with heavy doses of the authors need to get approval from his readers, or possibly help with his psychological and sexual hang-ups.

This is the first of Hem's work that I've read and am very impressed with his writing and style. However, as I'm finding to be quite common with kindle editions, the book is riddled with errors. Some quality control please!!!

I know that Hemingway is considered to be a great author but this version of his works left me very unimpressed. Many of the short stories were actually just stories that he began and never finished or they were writing exercises. Many of the stories had no conclusion and the story would just simply stop... leaving me saying "WTH" I thought the book would be a collection of complete short stories with some sort of ending to each story. Hemingway has written many full length books and they may be better than this short story collection but I won't be paying any money to find out. Maybe I will check them out at the local library some day.

If by some definition a great writer is master of the mundane in human lives then Hemingway is a great writer. I did not study him in high school or college and thought I would read some of his works now but these stories are anything but exciting or knowledgeable. They are rather dull even though they display the dull time many of us have in life. Maybe that is the goal here.

It almost seems like the author writes about death only. Several stories do not flow. One story just stops! The editors warn you that it is incomplete and they are not kidding. A working knowledge of Spanish, and sometimes French, is necessary to follow the story.

Unfortunately I will not be able to read this book because the text is so small. Even with my reading glasses on, it is a huge strain on the eyes and gave me a headache after a very short while. I would not buy this unless you have exceptional eyesight.

Mano a’ Mano
By Bob Gelms
One of the exciting parts of Christmas for me is the fact that my whole family feeds the book monster in me. There are always two or three books under the tree. Today's book could be a holiday present to you or to the reader in your life.

I recently acquired The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. The so called Finca Vigia Edition which refers to the land and house Ernest Hemingway bought in Cuba. It was there that he wrote the first 49 stories published in magazines and then in hard cover. Those stories are stunning. EH, in my opinion, was a much better short story writer than a novelist, with the notable exception of the novella The Old Man and the Sea.
You have to remember how popular EH and his sometimes pal, F. Scott Fitzgerald, were in the 1920’s and 30’s. It has been written that Fitzgerald sometimes commanded $4,000 per story (which is more than my granddad made in a year back then). And a Hemingway story about to be published in Cosmopolitan had the magazine's print run top out at five million copies which sold out in two days. As the literary rock stars of the day, these guys had a mano a' mano, love-hate relationship.
Put The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway on your list for that reader in your life. The stories are very enjoyable without having to try to read meaning into them. However, it’s not possible to miss Papa’s attitude toward women. The women in these stories are manipulative, phony gold diggers and, in the story that kicks off the book, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, possibly murderous.
Francis’ life, in a way, was as short as it gets. Happy??? Well, I’m in the camp that says he was. He became for a painfully short time, a man who literally takes on dangerous African big game, looks them straight in the eye, and stands his ground. Do you think his wife killed Francis on purpose or was it an accident as she was trying to save his life? Great stuff!
The third offering in the book, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, is, to my mind, the most famous Hemingway story. By acclimation, it’s on the short list of his stories in the Nobel Prize area. It starts out with mysteries about the frozen body of a leopard near the summit, where we meet Harry and Helen. Harry has gangrene, is out of sorts and also happens to be dying.
Harry's character could have easily been ripped out of Ulysses by James Joyce, another contemporary of Hemingway. Harry is a failed writer and has many thoughts on the subject. We get to know him very intimately through the use of stream-of-consciousness, a literary technique perfected to a spectacular degree by Joyce in his masterwork.
I have always been uncertain of one thing in Kilimanjaro. Most people think Harry and Helen are married. I don’t. I think she is Harry’s companion. Are there any opinions out there? This is a quite powerful story and has been dissected and eviscerated in American Lit classes for 80 years.
Joyce and Hemingway palled around the left bank in Paris when they both lived there in the 1920s. They drank heavily and Joyce’s wife to be, Nora, thought Hemingway was a bad influence on her poor Jim. Well, he was! But that didn’t interfere with Joyce’s literary opinion. He was quoted as saying, “Hemingway has reduced the veil between literature and life… A Clean Well-Lighted Place... is one of the best short stories ever written.”
A Clean Well-Lighted Place is not only a tour-de-force but also my favorite Hemingway story. He creates this magic in just four pages. Another famous writer who thought highly of the story, Hemingway himself, said this was HIS favorite story. Now, that’s an endorsement.
A small café late at night. One patron drinking brandy. Two waiters talking about the old man. The youngest waiter overfills the glass. He wants the old man to leave so he can go home to his wife. When the old man drinks it down and asks for another, the young waiter says the place is closed and sends him on his way. The story is in the conversation the two waiters are having about their lot in life, the older one musing that for some people it is important, for a moment of happiness, to have a clean, well-lighted place to go to spend some time.
This story is a 900-pound gorilla who is exceptionally busy. It is packed to the bursting point. Every time I read it, I get a little more out of it.
Wrap up The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway and give it to someone you love for the holidays. This book is filled with amazing tales and it has one great advantage as a gift. When the reader in your life shakes the package to try to figure out what's inside, it doesn't make any noise.

This books starts off with four longer stories from his "later" writing (circa 1936), including "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", "The Capital Of The World", "The Snows Of Kilimanjaro", "The Old Man At The Bridge", and one of his earlier stories "Up In Michigan" from 1923. After that it collects the 15 stories of In Our Time (1925, re-published with extra story in 1955) running from "On The Quai At Smyrrna" (page 79) to "Big Two-Hearted River" (page 197), the 14 stories of Men Without Women (1927), running from "The Undefeated" (page 223) to "Now I Lay Me" (page 340), and Winner Take Nothing (1933), and 14 more stories from "After The Storm" (page page 348) to "Fathers And Sons" (page 457).

Hemingway's tales are gorgeous, and the two that lead it off are champs of storytelling, both set in Africa. They are also both longer than most, which in some cases only run two pages; four- or five-paged stories make up the bulk of the collection. The themes are familiar - fishing, hunting, bullfighting, fighting. Relationships form another theme, although not as much as general manhood. There is some German used throughout, some French, some Italian. One tale gets experimental - the same incident captured as three different moments in time. Another is half-stream of consciousness. The tales from In Our Time are interspersed with one-paragraph random vignettes that are often just as powerful as full short stories. What a wealth in these 467 pages.

Hemingway also wrote a preface for this 1938 publication, where he explains "The first four stories are the last ones I have written. The others follow in the order they were originally published"; but there is no other introduction, epilogue, bibliography, footnotes or index. He mentions where he was when he wrote which stories, refers to the fact that his stories have been included in English textbook anthologies, and he lists his own favourite stories. He also mentions "I would like to lie long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories. I know some pretty good ones." Of course, he did publish three more novels before he died in 1960, and left 332 other unpublished works.

Unfortunately, this edition has quite a few typos, including "Bag Two-Hearted River: Part I" (which is followed by the correctly-spelled "Big Two-Hearted River: Part II").

I received a free electronic copy of this collection of short stories from Netgalley, the heirs of Ernest Hemingway, and Scribner. Thank you all for sharing this hard work with me!

Many of these stories I read as a young adult back in the '60's and 70's. I am grateful for the opportunity to read those again, and the addition of his detailed editing is so revealing and so personal - thank you again. And I am most grateful for the new stories, especially those written when he was a young man. You can watch the evolution of a great writer by studying his method of fine tuning a story. Less is certainly more. I don't think I really understood that until I read this book. He was a master. He will always be missed.

The Short Stories contains 49 of these stories by Ernest Hemmingway. Included in this group are some of his best known stories such as The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Undefeated, and The Killers. In The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio Hemmingway displays his sense of humor, which surprised me given the serious and even tragic nature of most of his work. These stories display Hemmingway’s spare and direct writing style. On the other hand, many of the stories are as short as one page and hardly worth reading. My recommendation is to skim these and focus on the best ones.

The stories cover all the topics that Hemmingway is noted for: war, Africa and big game hunting, bull fighting, fishing and other “manly” things. Hemmingway’s men are often flawed and come to tragic ends. His women are typically bit players. This book could be rated at five stars for the best stories or three for the many short ones. Reading some Hemmingway should be a part of every educated person’s literary experience. But his novels are more useful.

If you are new to Hemingway I think his short stories are a great place to start. This book contains 49 of his best. I fully understand that he is a writer that some people don't appreciate ((which is ok) but if you are a serious reader then you should have some knowledge of his writing style, influence, subject matter etc. Some of his topics including hunting, fishing, bullfighting, boxing etc might be "out of style" these days but there are several stories to choose from and, like it or not, Hemingway was considered a top tier American writer of the 20th century. He was also a writer-celebrity similar to Mark Twain. I personally think the "cult of Papa" was something he outwardly cultivated, something to hide behind but I think the real man was sensitive to the world. At the end he was struggling with mental issues, high blood pressure, writing difficulties etc. If you like some of the short stories, try A Farewell to Arms, my favorite Hemingway novel.

What you sent me is not a series of short stories but a bunch of gibberrish. You need th rescan and title each story so we know what it is. Many pages are nothing more than cut & paste. If you cannot fix, please refund. DMJewell

This is a hard book for me to review. The truth is, I have never been a huge Hemingway fan, and I have always been a little bit mystified by his popular appeal and critical reputation. I certainly admire Hemingway's technique, I understand that he revolutionized English prose, and the short story genre in particular, and there is probably not a writer living today who has not been influenced by him in one way or another. I also just read two really excellent critical works on Hemingway's short stories. One is a collection of critical essays edited by Jackson Benson: The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays and the other is a book length treatment of Hemingway's technique and craft by Robert Paul Lamb Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story. The latter book, especially, increased my appreciation for Hemingway's craft a hundred fold. Hemingway is deceptively simple to read, and I think his reputation has probably suffered to some degree because his stories seem simple and easily accessible and, therefore, it seems like they lack depth or artistry. Nothing could be further from the truth and reading Lamb's book made me realize how much Hemingway was able to convey with a few well chosen words and how much depth lies hidden behind the surface simplicity of his prose and dialogue.

All that having been said, I find many of Hemingway's stories fairly uninteresting. A huge percentage of Hemingway's stories are about bullfighting, boxing, hunting, fishing, horse racing, or war. With the exception of war none of those subjects really interest me that much and even Hemingway's artistry is often not enough to get me very enthused about his subjects. There are obvious exceptions. There are some really excellent stories in this collection that are not on any of those subjects, such as "Indian Summer", "The End of Something", "Cat in the Rain", "Hills Like White Elephants", "After the Storm", and "A Clean Well-Lighted Place". There are also a couple of stories on hunting and fishing that I found myself enjoying despite my lack of interest in the subject, especially "Big Two-Hearted River" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". And finally, there were some war stories I really liked, such as "Now I Lay Me" and "A Way You'll Never Be". That is eleven stories and, while I am sure there are probably a few stories I liked that I am forgetting, that is still not even one fourth of the stories in this volume, which is not to say I hated all the rest, but I sometimes found myself a bit bored. "Fifty-Grand", for example, is one of his better stories according to critics, but I just could not get all that interested in it. Even "The Killers" left me mostly cold.

So, I am kind of torn between my respect for Hemingway's craft, and his obvious talent as a writer, and my general lack of interest in most of what I have read by him (I do want to make an exception for his late novel For Whom the Bell Tolls which I am just finishing and is the first Hemingway book I have read that I can genuinely say I liked without reservation). Bottom line is: if you like the subjects I mentioned, and you like good writing, then chances are you will love this book. If you are a writer you can certainly learn a lot reading Hemingway's stories even if you are not interested in his subjects. Hemingway was a master at conveying mood through a few well chosen details, and he was a master of indirect meaning-laden dialogue, among many other things. I do wish that he had applied his obvious talents to subjects that I am more interested in. I am not really sure why he failed to take my personal feelings into consideration when choosing his subjects. It is true, I was born twenty-two years after Hemingway's death, still, it seems like an oversight on his part. It is also strange to me that none of the critical essays I read on Hemingway's stories took that particular failing into account.

In the rest of my review I am going to try to explain what I like about Hemingway's stories in general and what I do not like about Hemingway's stories in general. I should point out that I am indebted to the books I have read on Hemingway's stories for many of the insights into the stories in the rest of my review. There was a ton that I missed on my first read through of the stories. I will try to give credit where credit is due but it is possible that I might slip an insight in here or there as if it were my own despite the fact that it has its original source in something I read. It is often difficult for me to distinguish between my own insights and what I have read after the fact. I definitely recommend reading the two books I mentioned above if you are interested in pursuing Hemingway's stories in greater depth. They really are two of the best books of literary criticism I have ever read on any author.

WHAT I LIKE ABOUT HEMINGWAY'S STORIES

Hemingway famously articulated what came to be called his "iceberg theory" of the short-story. The most concise statement of it was, I believe, from one of Hemingway's letters. Hemingway wrote that "you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted...and make people feel more than they understood." Scholars have been debating ever since what Hemingway meant exactly and which stories are the best illustrations of his "iceberg" technique. I am not a Hemingway scholar but I know that "Big Two-Hearted River" is often given as an example of the technique. The story is about a shell shocked Nick Adams who goes fishing to help recover his sanity after the war but the war is never mentioned directly in the story. There are hints of it in the burnt out country side, a symbol for Nick's scorched past, but it is never mentioned directly. I actually think that this can be a very effective technique and it is one of the things I like about Hemingway's stories. There is no doubt that I often feel more than I understand when reading Hemingway. There is also the sense that there is something heavy, like a whale, floating just beneath the surface, which can be quite powerful, but also somewhat disconcerting. There is a feeling that a lot of pain and anguish is being held back, like we are only seeing the very tip of the iceberg (hence the name of the theory), in a Hemingway story, and I think that is often more effective than having the feelings erupt openly.

I also appreciate Hemingway's lack of romanticism. A lot of Hemingway's stories are about the disillusionment that often follows in the wake of a genuine confrontation with reality. There is a short story called, aptly enough, "A Very Short Story", and it is about a soldier who falls in love with a nurse. They agree they are going to be married but Luz, the nurse, does not want to go to America with the soldier until he has a job. So the soldier goes back to get a job without Luz but, in the meantime, Luz meets an Italian, falls in love, and writes to the soldier to say the engagement is off. The last line of the story is "A short time after [receiving the letter that is] he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxi cab through Lincoln Park" (142). The story moves from a very romantic view of love to the harsh reality of venereal disease. It reminds me of the novel Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham. The main character in Maugham's book has a poet friend who is constantly writing poetry about the romance of first love, so the main character decides to have a brief affair with a woman, but when she undresses he is somewhat disgusted with the realities of her flesh. He eventually gets a letter from his friend congratulating him on his first love affair and singing its praises in very Romantic terms. The main character considers it all rubbish and throws the letter in the trash. I respect that lack of romanticism, and I also respect that Hemingway's characters do not simply collapse in despair in response to disillusionment. It is possible, according to Hemingway, to live in the world without illusions with honesty and courage.

Hemingway was also great at developing natural symbols. One of the essays in Benson's volume analyzed Hemingway's African stories "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". There are some particularly interesting symbols in the latter story. Hemingway rejects the traditional symbol of death. The main character says "Never believe any of that about a scythe and a skull". Instead, Hemingway chooses to represent death as a stalking hyena, a much more potent, and appropriate symbol, in my opinion. Hemingway also refuses to represent the afterlife in traditional terms with winged chariots and gates in the clouds or an eternal sunrise. Instead, the trip to the realm of the dead is represented as a plane journey which ends when "ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going" (76). The epigraph also contains one of Hemingway's most interesting symbols. The epigraph is about some leopard bones found near the summit of Kilimanjaro and "No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude" (52). According to the essay I read, the leopard is a symbol of Harry's moral idealism, which he trades in for a comfortable life. I think finding these kinds of natural symbols is one of the primary jobs of a writer, and Hemingway does a good job finding natural symbols with a lot of power and interest behind them. And they are almost always unique to Hemingway, and not just the standard cliche symbols.

Hemingway is also great at getting to the essence of something through small details. In "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife", for example, the short dialogue between Nick's parents gets to the heart of their relationship, the schism between them, and the general atmosphere of Nick's home life, in a really powerful way. Some writers would have gone for the extreme effect. If they wanted to convey the conflict in Nick's home they would have had the parents screaming at each other. For some reason, it is much more powerful when the conflict is portrayed more subtly. If there had been a blow up fight between Nick's parents it would have been a pretty boring story. As it stands, however, it is a very interesting story. Another example of that, and for this insight I am indebted to Lamb's book, is the opening dialogue in "Hills Like White Elephants". Here is the opening dialogue "'What should we drink?' the girl asked...'It's pretty hot,' the man said. 'Let's drink beer'" (273). Everything about the relationship between the man and the woman is conveyed in that short dialogue. First, the woman looks to the man to make decisions. Second, the man manipulates the woman into making it seem like she is choosing while still making sure that he gets what he wants. He does not answer her directly. He does not say "I want beer" but he says something that he knows will lead her to "choose" beer. That is what the entire story is about, his attempt to get her to "choose" of her own volition to have an abortion, to absolve him of the responsibility of asking her to have an abortion, he wants it to seem like it was her choice, which she refuses to do. It is amazing how Hemingway was able to capture all of that in such a short opening dialogue. I admit I missed all of that the first time through, and it was only Lamb's analysis that brought all that to light for my conscious mind, but I am sure, as Hemingway said, we feel it, even if we do not understand it.

Finally, Hemingway was amazing at capturing mood through small details (I am, again, indebted to Lamb's analysis for this insight). All of the details in the opening of "A Cat in the Rain": the fact that the husband and wife are the "only two Americans stopping at the hotel", the fact that they "did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs", Hemingway's highlighting of the present-absence of the painters in the square due to the rain, and the lack of motor cars, all add to the sense of isolation that the woman in the story is feeling. This is, again, something that the reader feels, even if they do not consciously understand it. If Hemingway had chosen to set the story on a bright sunny day with tons of people in the square the whole mood of the story would be different even if the rest of the story had remained unchanged.

So, those are some of the things I appreciate about Hemingway's stories.

WHAT I DO NOT LIKE ABOUT HEMINGWAY'S STORIES

Hemingway had a theory that you should not convey emotion directly but try to convey the impression that produced the emotion in the first place. That is why many of his characters seem to be totally lacking in affect. Hemingway gives the impression, but leaves out the emotion, and lets the reader fill that in for themselves (this is what Lamb calls "impressionism" as opposed to "expressionism" which works by giving the emotion and leaving out the impression). I actually admire Hemingway's impressionistic technique and I think it works quite well a lot of the time. Rain puddles in an empty square, for example, are able to convey a sense of loneliness without having to say "She was lonely", and it is more powerful, I think, if you do not have to say it directly. However, the technique assumes that readers have similar sensibilities and react similarly to similar impressions, or, at the very least, it assumes that they will react. The problem is, we do not all have the same sensibilities. Now, it would not be a huge problem if a particular impression produced an emotion that Hemingway did not intend. Different readers are going to have different reactions to different stories and that does not destroy the integrity of the story. The problem I found is, a lot of Hemingway's stories left me entirely cold. I felt as affectless as Hemingway's prose. I literally felt nothing. I do not particularly like that effect. It feels dead to me. Ultimately, I think that Hemingway and I probably have very different sensibilities and do not react the same way to the same impressions. Something he might find deeply moving leaves me cold.

The second problem I had with the stories is really connected to the first. Since Hemingway leaves out the emotions many of the stories seem quite abstract and divorced from actual experience to me. They feel like skeletons with all the meat cut off. They feel like the outlines of a story rather than an actual story. I think Hemingway might have been operating with the theory that our experience moves from impression to emotion in a one-way temporal and causal process. The truth is, there is no such thing as a simple impression divorced from emotion. They are always mixed and, while sometimes impressions produce emotions, there are also times when our emotions influence our perceptions. The fact that we always experience impressions and emotions together, and never separate, as I think Hemingway may have mistakenly assumed, means that when we are presented with one or the other in isolation, it feels unreal to us, like something is missing. That is the feeling I had reading a story like "The Killers". Some people must really like that effect, or they think it works, or, perhaps their sensibilities are different from mine, and they are able to fill in the missing half, but to me, it just feels strange.

The third problem I already mentioned at the beginning of my review. I am just not that interested in most of Hemingway's subjects. I just cannot get that excited about an old and broken boxer, and even Hemingway's artistry is not enough to convince me of his nobility. This is probably tied to our different sensibilities as well. The image of a broken boxer who is able to control himself and not go down when he is struck below the belt was, I think, probably a powerful and evocative image for Hemingway, representing nobility, artistry, courage, etc.. The image just leaves me cold. It has none of the power that I think Hemingway probably intended. The story may be well written but if the symbols do not connect it is going to be hard to summon much interest in the story.

Finally, Hemingway and I just have very different values, and I am convinced that aesthetic judgments are always tied up with value judgments about right and wrong, judgments about what kinds of life are worth living, what sorts of people are worth emulating and looking up to, etc.. Hemingway looks up to boxers, bullfighters, and hunters, while I tend to admire philosophers, poets, and Zen masters (among others), so, where Hemingway feels nobility, I often feel emptiness. The boxer in "Fifty-Grand" does not leave me feeling hopeful in response to the nobility of character he displays in the boxing ring or happy that such nobility still exists in sport even alongside all the corruption. I find the values behind sport to be hollow and empty so the whole story, to me, just conveys a sense of hollowness and vanity. I feel like the boxer has wasted his life and has endured his loneliness for nothing. I am quite sure that is not the effect that Hemingway intended. I am not saying that I am right or wrong about that, that is just how I feel, and I think it explains why many of Hemingway's stories fail to move me in any significant way. What, for Hemingway, is a symbol of courage, and the ability to live meaningfully in an ultimately meaningless world is, for me, a symbol of the vanity of all worldly values. It undoes Hemingway's intended effect. Instead of feeling inspired I just feel depressed.

So, that is what I do not like about Hemingway's stories. And now, I am done writing about Hemingway's stories, for the time being, at least. I should add that, while I read this particular volume of the first forty-nine stories, there is really no reason not to just buy The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. The price is almost the same and there are some stories in the latter volume, his stories on the Spanish Civil War, for example, that do not appear in this volume.

I am amused at the title of this presentation. To say that it is the complete short stories of Ernest Hemingway would seem to be somewhat of an oxymoron, because I am not sure if Hemingway ever wrote a "complete short story." His stories are drawn from experiences and situations that the readers found interesting and exciting at the time and he went to great lengths to describe things, and certainly had considerable skill in doing that. But to use the word "complete" in his writing would seem to be a misnomer. In most cases, he starts a story, vividly describes the characters and surroundings, and then leaves the reader to wonder what the hell happened. I tend to believe that Hemingway capitalized on his personal life experiences rather that his ability to tell a story. Once he became a celebrity, most critics bowed to his reputation, and publishers bowed to him for business reasons. I do not think he would have been nearly as successful if he would have had to compete in a literary environment where the readers were not starved for exotic foreign scenarios like they were in his heyday.

I realize that I am criticizing an established and revered public icon, and I will admit to my limited qualifications to do so; but I like to enjoy what I read, and though I have not read everything Hemingway wrote, this collection certainly does not encourage me to do so.

The quality of the book itself is very bad, and without any abuse or mishandling, pages came loose and fell out. (This is also mentioned in other reviews.)

I recently reviewed this same compilation of short stories in an edition that included the short play The Fifth Column that I was interested in discussing concerning the problem of spies and infiltrators from the Franco-led Nationalist side-and what to do about them- in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. This edition does not contain that play and therefore I can discuss the short stories on their own terms. Although Hemingway wrote many novels, most of which I have read at one time or another, I believe that his style and sparseness of language was more suitable to the short story. This compilation of his first forty-nine although somewhat uneven in quality, as is always the case with any writer, I think makes my point. In any case they contain not only some of his most famous short stories but also some of the best.

The range of subjects that interested Hemingway is reflected here, especially those that defined masculinity in his era. Included here are classics such as The Snows of Kilimanjaro about the big game hunt, The Killers- a short and pungent gangster tale that was made into a much longer movie, many of the youthful Nick Adams stories tracing his adventures from puberty to his time of service in World War I, stories on bullfighting- probably more than you will ever want to know about that subject but reflecting an aficiado's appreciation of the art form, a few on the never-ending problems of love and its heartbreaks including a metaphorical one, reflecting the censorious nature of the times, on the impact of abortion on a couple's relationship, and some sketches that were included in A Farewell to Arms. Well worth your time. As always Hemingway masterly wields his sparse and functional language to make his points. Again, as always read this man. This is part of our literary heritage.

Hemingway is one of the great masters of the short- story. His short - stories are far superior to his novels, and among them are a handful of true masterpieces. The stories are written with a clean and precise language, the distinctive Hemingway style with its lack of flowery description, and its Biblical conjunction, and rhythm. "The war was always there but we did not go to it any more" is the beginning of one of his greatest stories " In Another Country." In another of his small masterpieces " A Clean- Well Lighted Place" he closes with 'Our nada who are in nada " nihilistic transformation of 'The Lord's Prayer". In another the soldier Krebs home from the war amongst people who cannot understand what he has gone through , replies to his mother's question as to whether he loves her, " No , Ma, I don't love anyone" .

The Hemingway language is condensed, striking, and has a poetic memorability .

The situations are often ones of test where the famous Hemingway definition of courage as ' grace under pressure" comes into play. Often there is disillusion and often death. And there are too, beginning with the Nick Adams' stories that very special Hemingway encounter with the natural world. "Big Two- Hearted River"

Hemingway's stories are by and large 'men's stories' and stories in which manhood is tried , tested, and often undermined. The world is one of threat, and one in which all the big words which express abstract concepts seem to be irrelevant and false. Concrete perceptions and direct and simple relation of them, dialogue which in itself is the action and moves too with a tension - and dramatic quality are at the heart of the stories.

The threat of breakdown, the fear of loss of control, the living by some kind of 'code' which enables the dealing with all of this- these too are elements in these very great stories.

Something that helps make you live forward... Stories of people and questions of the observations of are human experience. Something imagination is shown as important and possible. A common component of human history that we must all agree to do something about. Deal with the moment and see past the condition that has been layered onto your story. Build your own story. Open yourself up to the imagination and seduction not sharing your story to quickly.

On the rating I waffled between a 3 and 4. It was different reading Hemmingway as a 45-year-old than it was as a teenager. When I first read this collection of stories I was considering a career as a writer, possibly as a journalist, and I was exploring as much of the literary canon as possible. In some ways, I was much more open to different things than I am now, especially works of critical acclaim. Nowadays I read mostly for pleasure in my leisure hours and have fallen into a bit of a rut as far as the genres I favor.

That said, Hemmingway's sparse style is refreshing after an appetite of mysteries, thrillers, chick lit and fantasy. I have to say I am not crazy about his prominent topics of bullfighting and war, but I do appreciate has "man communing with nature" stories, especially those featuring Nick Adams. Having recently read The Paris Wife: A Novel, it seems obvious that some of his stories in this collection come from his own experiences. In particular, I was struck by "A Canary for One," which I imagine is based on a train trip Hemmingway took with his first wife, Hadley, after they realized they were breaking up. By the same token, I favor the relationship stores, whether between a man and a woman ("Hills Like White Elephants") or between man and the rest of humanity ("A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"). Overall, I am glad I reread these stories and I ended up liking them enough that I am getting ready to start A Moveable Feast.

The standard refrain is that Hemingway was a master of short fiction. There is something about the minimalism of his style, and the short format, that create a happy marriage of form, substance, and length.

That is certainly shown in this collection of stories, which feature some of his most well-known works. Coming back to these stories after a few years, one is struck by the geograpical span of the works. This quintessential American writer was at home in the world. The stories take place in Spain, Italy, France, Greece, Switzerland, Africa, the American West, and Upper Michigan. Hemingway was reaping the benefit of America's expansion after the Great War. He could go anywhere, do anything, and from that experience, distill these gem-like stories.

In exploring the world, he found uniquely American stories to tell.

Ernest Hemingway was the writer I idolized the most when I was going to school and reading the great writers. It was Hemingway and Faulkner at the top, and nobody else quite ascended to their lofty perch. Hemingway developed a style of writing stripped of excessive descriptions combined with the deft, almost unnoticed repetition of key words. His contribution to literature as a stylist is incalculable. He taught twentieth-century authors how to write dialog, and his influence on famous writers around the globe outshines perhaps that of anyone else. This simple yet power-packed method of writing has aged well over the years, and the stories don't seem dated at all to modern readers. Although he wrote several highly regarded novels, many believe Hemingway's terse, no-frills writing style was best suited for short stories, and the evidence in this volume is hard to argue with. I'll highlight a few of his most famous stories:

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Harry, a failed writer, ruminates on his wasted literary talent while on safari in Africa. His leg has become infected and he awaits a plane to take him away for medical treatment before his health becomes critical. After he reminisces about many things in his life he could have written about but didn't, the plane finally arrives to pick him up, and what a ride it is! This is an example of what Hemingway called the "wow" ending, and this just may be the best that was ever written. I can't imagine anyone interested in literature not having read this story.

The Short, Happy Life of Francis McComber

Did she or didn't she? McComber and his wife are on safari in Africa, led by a veteran guide who knows how to hunt and how to accommodate tourists looking for a bit of adventure. Like Snows, the ending is shrouded in mystery as the reader is left wondering why things ended the way they did, and who's to blame.

The Killers

Hemingway often wrote according to the principles of his famous "iceberg theory": "There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows," he said. "Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg." This iceberg method of writing is showcased in "The Killers," of which Hemingway said he left out more than just about any other story he wrote. On one level, the story is about a boxer who got on the wrong side of the mob in 1930s Chicago; on another, it refers to Hemingway's literary battle with his mentor, Sherwood Anderson. The scholarly critics are still scratching their heads over this masterpiece.

Big Two-Hearted River

Nick Adams, back home from the war, fishes and eats in a ritualistic manner that suggests he has suffered some sort of psychological trauma that he needs to overcome. But was the problem induced by the barbarism of war or by earlier family-related ordeals?

This is one of a handful of the best short story collections out there. Don't miss it.

If ever you've wondered what made Hemingway the renowned writer that he was, you could do worse than to pick up "The Complete Short Stories". Here, you will experience first hand the tough, terse prose and the short, declarative sentences that won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
In this definitive collection, you will not only find some of Hemingway's classics, like 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' and 'Hills Like White Elephants', you will also find much previously unpublished work, some little more than a page long (like Old Man at the Bridge). This is one of those books that you can dive into for a few minutes at a time to enjoy, not only the short story, but also the power and beauty of the written word. Here is Hemingway in his most potent form - not a single unnecessary word - and with everything important left unsaid, but with all the clues in place for the reader to find.
A must for any lover of literature.

Hemingway is one of the finest writers this country has every produced. In these politically correct times, he was fallen into disfavor, and that is a crying shame. His terse, lean lines are so easy to mock today, but what people forget is that he created that style, molded it and trimmed it down from the long-winded, more European style of writing that was so popular before his advent. As a short story writer, he is the master. Not a wasted word, and every word carved in its perfect place. When a Hemingway character plunges their arm into a cold stream, the reader can feel the ice cold numbing the fingers. His short story, "The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber" turned me onto reading as a teenager. So much came from him, and so much still comes from him. Raymond Carver, James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard and many others all walk a clear path that he cut through thick brush.

Hemingway's writing is a grand example of stylistic dichotomy: His prose is as austere and utilitarian as a barn, yet his stories, unique and instantly recognizable as his own, pound with energy, drama, and almost excessive bravado. He wastes no time on literary pretension and gets right down to business; writing, drinking, and living life to the fullest are inextricably entwined, and nothing matters more than a well-worded and well-placed line of dialogue.
Hemingway's subject matter is easy to summarize: he writes about the things he actively enjoys. His short stories cover safaris, hunting, fishing, the outdoors ("Big Two-Hearted River"), boating, horse racing ("My Old Man"), bullfighting ("The Undefeated"), boxing ("Fifty Grand"), war, lowlife crime ("The Killers"), even a couple of fairy tales. Basically, Hemingway can turn anything adventurous and daring into reading material for the armchair weekend warrior. With a few exceptions, the stories take place either in the plains of Africa, throughout war-torn European countries, or in and around Michigan.
While some of the stories profess nothing more than pure narration, the recreational activities of the characters usually serve as a backdrop against which they face private conflicts or ethical dilemmas. Realism is emphasized, and only "Cat in the Rain" can be said to have a conventional happy ending, albeit one that glosses over the heroine's real problems. Hemingway is more interested in the seedy side of life, portraying people on the fringes of society: vagabonds, smugglers, expatriates. An important distinction about his war stories is that he tends to write not about soldiers, but about fighters -- individualistic rebels who are compelled by the strength of their political convictions and revel in the camaraderie on and off the battlefield, often with a bottle of fine wine.
The two stories that bookend this collection are indicative of the diversity of Hemingway's thematic repertoire. The title character of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" exposes his cowardice to his wife and loses the real trophy -- her love -- to their safari guide, even while regaining his dignity in a final effort that is too little, too late. Hemingway appears to reflect himself in "The Strange Country," in which an acclaimed cosmopolitan writer takes a cross-country road trip with a much younger girl in a series of vignettes that contrasts the comfort of American domesticity with the imminent dangers of pre-World War II Europe. This is the ultimate expression of Hemingway's restlessness: The world was too small to contain him; life was too slow to keep up with him.

Hemingway was the great craftsman of the short story. A profound influence on nearly every writer who followed--influencing the likes of Ken Kesey in spirit and saturating the works of Raymond Carver--Hemingway's style and ethos are consistently powerful. This collection should prove to anybody that, whatever claims have been made about him in the nearly forty years since his death, his prose still glimmers with clarity and subtlety. It's hard to say which stories are his best--I have a personal affinity for "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," "Snows of Kilimanjaro," and "The Big Two-Hearted River." Any reader of English-language prose should at least attempt to skim Hemingway's milieu--he is, after all, possibly the most influential writer of English prose since Shakespeare. The short stories, briefer and more finely crafted than the novels, are a good place to start.

The Title is misleading. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway does NOT contain all the Short Stories written by Ernest Hemingway. You will be greatly disappointed if you purchase this volume thinking that you will then have all the short stories he wrote. As soon as you look at the Table of Contents looking for a specific story ( i.e. The Indians Moved Away and many others ) you then learn there are other collections comprising additional short stories not in this collection.
I purchased this text for a reading group whose goal is to read, discuss, and study the short stories of Hemingway only to find out during our first meeting that some of the members wanted to discuss titles my "complete" collection did not contain. Disappointment does not fully reflect my feelings.

There is little that I could say about Hemingway's short stories that hasn't been said before. But while Ernest Hemingway had magic with the written word, his old recordings of reading his own stories on tape are not good. Instead of sounding like how I would expect the story to be told (out loud), the author's voice is shrill and, in places, sounds more like an impression of Mark Twain. Stacy Keach is hands down the ideal voice of Hemingway's short stories (although I give four stars to Charleton Heston). His readings are straightforward, he employs accents where applicable, and minimizes the "he said" and "she said" words, making them place holders rather than part of the story itself. Based on the three volumes of Hemingway short stories, I am sufficiently enamored of Keach's readings to make me delve into other works of fiction that Keach has recorded on CD.

It is obvious to any reader of Hemingway that he is most famous for his cleverly plotted and well-written short stories. Such classics as "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," "Hills Like White Elephants," and many more have placed in the top ratings with the greatest short stories writers of all time. His simple prose contains more depth than that of writers who overwhelm their stories with too much description, too many modifiers. Hemingway tells stories that reach deep inside of the human soul and pull out pieces that we never knew existed or had long forgotten. His greatest feat is his ability to do this is so few words.

The Finca Vigia Edition is perhaps the best compiled collection of all of Hemingway's short fiction, a masterpiece for any literature lovers library. I recommend it especially to Hemingway readers, but also to readers of all types.

The Finca Vigia Edition of Hemingway's Short stories, deemed "Complete" contains all the undisputed canonical works from the First 49 short stories in Part one, short stories published in books and magazines after the first 49 in Part two, most about the Spanish Civil War. Readers will see familiar work here. One Trip Across is the beginning of the novel To Have and Have Not, and An African Story is David Bourne's story within a story in The Garden of Eden.

Part three, previously unpublished fiction, gets on more shaky ground. There is a piece that was pulled out of Islands in the Stream, called The Strange Country and called a short story by the editors. A Train Trip and The Porter where two chapters of a novel that Hemingway abandoned to pursue more promising work. Here they are considered self contained.

Noticeably absent from this "complete" collection are the Nick Adams pieces that were previously unpublished but published in The Nick Adams Stories (with the exception of The Last Good Country). Why the editors of this collection should consider one Hemingway abandoned novel a short story, while others are not, makes no apparent sense.

This is what happens when one monkeys about with an author's posthumous leavings. Categories get questioned and readers wonder what is going on.

It's no mystery Hemingway wrote a ton of material, and while some people say his stories are all kind of the same, I disagree. I haven't read all of his work, but stories like "The Killers" and "Hills Like White Elephants" reach into completely different aspects of human nature. "The Killers" is shocking and alarming when you consider the utter indifference the hitmen in story have towards life - especially at how accurate this portrays the behavior of a sociopathic killer. "Hills like white Elephants," one of his most commonly discussed short stories, shows the natural depravity of our nature, and shows a common kind of inability to handle the consequences of our actions.

Anyway, the point is, even though Hemingway had a distinct style that can seem homogonized at times, he really grew as a writer, and this collection of short stories really demonstrates this.

"The Sun Also Rises" is definitly my favoraite Hemingway story, and most people would agree it was his cleanest/tightest work of writing, but you simply will not get the full sense of who Hemingway was as a writer and the impact he had on literature if you don't tackle his short stories as well. This I'm pretty sure has all of them, or at least vast majority of them. I would say this is one of the more important texts to get, because personally I didn't even get into hemingway untill I read "The Killers" and "The Nick Adam's Stories," and saw for myself how much life Hemingway had a grasp on.

This edition contains the text published by Scribners as The First 49 Stories or The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. The formatting of the Table of Contents is rather ugly and looks cheaply done. I would recommend instead, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway--The Finca Vigia Edition, which contains all the stories in this book, an introduction written by his sons in 1987, as well as more than 20 other stories collected from various sources. The pages of the Finca Vigia edition also look much better on the Kindle.

This edition of the short stories normally sells on the store for about two dollars less than the Finca Vigia. If you are buying this text to read for a class and want to save two dollars, you might be perfectly happy with this edition. However, if you want an e-book edition of Hemingway's stories to replace your print copy, you should spend the extra money and buy the Finca Vigia.

I read this book in two weeks, and many of the stories I read over and over, such as "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" and the Nick Adams stories. Hemingway's writing is sparse on adverbs and adjectives; his is straight forward English. This allows the reader to read through each story without having to reread a paragraph for clarity. The images and emotions that Hemingway evokes through his prose are clear and sharp. At times I felt as though I were right there with Nick Adams throwing my line into the fast-moving stream; as though I were in the bull-fighting arena watching Manuel Garcia perform his veronicas; as though I were holding Frances Macomber's gun as the buffalo was charging at him. Some of the stories I didn't particularly like (On the Quai at Smyrna, Mr. and Mrs. Elliott) but the strong stories made up for them. No wonder Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. Certainly the judges for that award looked back at his stories in deciding. Buy the book and enjoy it!

This selection of short pieces is an excellent and substantial part of Hemingway's ouevre. Some of them are now considered as classics of the short story form, such as "The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macowber" and "The Killers" -- a story which took, it is said, three years for Hemingway to complete. A clever stylist of American Modernism, his work is characterised by the staccato, laconic, minimalist sentences and expressions, which create a superbly "real", as opposed to merely literary, effect. Later examples of his work show how he further experimented with this style, in an effort to endow language with greater powers of precision and clarity. Unfortunately, the result is sometimes stilted and clumsy, particularly in the dialogue. This collection is recommended for its inclusion of some of his finest short works. Others, such as "This is Friday" and "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" are not exactly literary gems, but the reader will be left to judge for him/herself.

This collection of stories by Heminway represents a great find for all who want to know more about this artist. They are grouped in a manner where the reader can see the development of his writing style as he matured as a writer. i highly recommend this collection.

Hemingway is best known for his novels, like "A farewell to Arms", "For Whom The Bell Tolls", and "The Old Man and the Sea", but he also wrote a handful of true masterpieces in the short story form, most notably "The Snows of Kilimamjaro." And he wrote many competent stories still worth reading today. What is most pleasing is his use of short sentences and simple syntax, simple style. There's nothing pretentious or wordy about Hemingway's fiction, and it is this uncluttered naturalness of his writing style that has so influenced succeeding generations of novelists and storytellers. As a writer of novels and stories, he helped make the clear, modern fiction style of writing popular, avoiding "cheap meaningless words and stylistic embellishments." Most of his short fiction is set in Italy and Spain, like the story "Hills Like White Elephants."
David Rehak
author of "A Young Girl's Crimes"

I bought the first 49 a while back, and then I saw this. This has everything that the first 49 has and also all the rest of his published stories along with some of his unpublished work. However, both volumes are excelent. Hemingway, in my opinion, is the best short story writer of the 20th century. His short stories take up most of his work and they are excellent. Some say that his short stories are more of an essence of his work than his novels, though I tend to disagree. You will not be disappointed with this purchase, as you will enjoy most of the stories, probably dislike some, and read several over and over again.

Many of us read Ernest Hemingway's novels in high school and on our own, so we know he's one of the grand masters of long fiction, but you don't get to know Hemingway until you read his short stories. I believe The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway would be the other book, besides the Bible, I take with me on a desert island. The reader gets the finest of entertainment, and the writer, professional and aspiring, get lessons in fiction you won't learn in school. Buy a copy. See exactly what it is I am trying to tell you.

Salvatore Buttaci, author of FLASHING MY SHORTS

The " literary trick ", as he wrote seeming real each scene, the trick as Henry James would say! I thought in spite of the economy in words and adjectives, short sentences and pronouns, and of hundreds of implicit sentences doing that you had to guess what is happening in the scene, in the moments really important, Hemingway would use some clear and polished adjectives linked to the main nouns, for example," clear" morning ," fresh "sands and like this he would pass us the kernel of the sentence and we take immediately, besides the dosed ironies that would send us in the direction that he wanted. But when I read the story " A clean, well-lighted place " place I noticed that all my analysis was a foolishly. Hemingway not only had reached the total art in this story, as also describes what is art!

It's fantastic to have all these stories in one book. "Hills Like White Elephant's" is still my favorite story, but I also enjoyed some that I had never heard of. I like the short declarative sentences; it makes for an easy read. I love that I can open it up to any story and just start reading. You don't have to start from the beginning and read it to the end. Each story only takes an hour at most to read - some probably twenty minutes if you're an extra fast reader.

It's Hemingway... I mean...

There's literally books written just reviewing, examining, breaking down, critiquing, and analyzing the guy, I hope you're not turning to some the store review to really turn the tides of whether or not you want to pickup a collection of his.

Ernest Hemingway was a master of the short story. Many of them (e.g. Hills Like White Elephants, A Clean Well Lighted Place, My Old Man) show him at his best. They are like prose poems, with every word appropriately placed, and with memorable characters, dialogue, irony, atmosphere and plot. His terse, simple style fit the short story beautifully. His novels suffer at times, but his best short stories are true masterpieces. Highly recommended.

This book is excellant in that if you love to read Hemingway,as I do, you can get all of his short stories in one book withouthaving to buy The Nick Adams Stories, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, In Our Time, Men Without Women, Winner Take Nothing, and The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway(FIRST 49). The value, completeness, and classic Hemingway prose of the Finca Vigia Edition makes it more than worth buying. Also, the stories are all very entertaining and it is fascinating when reading it that you can see how Hemingway matured as a writer through his career from his early stories to his last ones. Bottom line if you like Hemingways' works you'll definently want to get a copy of this, save yourself money too.

I like Hemingway, I have never developed the passion for him that so many others have had. The Old Man and the Sea was really, really well done, as was For Whom the Bell Tolls. As for most of the other works, well I just never saw the superstar status. This is why the short story/long novella The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber caught me completely off guard. If you're thinking about buying this collection, buy it for no other reason than to read this incredible piece of fiction. Hemingway has been called by many the great word economist, and in this instance I completely agree. Just about every word is completely vital to this overall story. Hemingway could've, and probably should've been greedy with this piece. He could've added a couple hundred words here and there to produce a novel, he didn't so far as I know. What he did was leave behind a jewel, a short story that has affected me like no other story I have ever read. SHL of FM is my favorite story of all time, and it casts such a large shadow that the next one is about 12th.

I like the contents, of course, I know Hemingway fairly well. I have his completed works but wanted a complete short story collection to substitute for my separate short story editions. Unfortunatelly, this complete short story collection was damaged in transport and is already disposed of in the waste-paper basket.....

Th wrong book was delivered to me with the cover of the book I had actually ordered! Not impressed! Hopefully this was just a slip up, as my other books arrived perfectly fine and in good shape as described!

Sandison is capitalizing on the rush for books on the 100th anniversary of Hemingway's birth. If you know nothing about Hemingway, the book is valuable, but Sandison's account of the life is a mechanical recitation of facts gleaned from the Lynn and Mellow biographies. Many of the well-reproduced photos lose their effect because of a faux sepia tone or a blue tint. The prose is often turgid, suggesting that Sandison would do well to reread and imitate Hemingway. Authorial or editorial errors abound. To cite from pages 77-80 only, Bumby's nanny is spelled "Rorbach" and "Rohrbach," the Fitzgeralds' daughter is "Scoltie," and "pseudonymous"--difficult enough to pronounce--gets orthographically spanked as "pseudonomymous." The book is good for bedtime reading, but it is not scholarly by a long stretch.

The hefty paperback had what I thought was an insert in its opening cover, but it was the first several pages of my favorite short story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." In trying to read other stories I found the print fine and a real struggle to hold the book without stretching the pages too much for fear of more sections breaking loose and falling out.

Now I haven't read many of Ernest Hemingway's stories though I want to, but I recently read "Hills Like White Elephants" for a college course, and I was surprised at the emotion and subtle meanings that he packed into the story with its sparse and vague discriptions of the surroundings and characters. He truly is a master.

ok- so i have heard SO many rants and raves about hemingway over the years, that i finally decided this summer to thoroughly investigate some. i read the old man and the sea and a farewell to arms years ago,and i liked both of them. then this past summer i read the sun also rises which i thought was very well done too- it took some time to get into but in the end it is a pretty sexy book actually. but everyone told me the short stories are the things to read. so i picked up and read the first 49, and i'm sorry, but i just didn't dig it. some of his stories are nice, such as TSHL of FM, and the snows of kiliman., and the undefeated, but i just did not go for the pages and pages of nick adams. it was very dry, and while i see how some people can appreciate that depiction of "real" humanity at it's rawest, but i feel like it doesn't go deep enough, and sometimes he tries too much to say things too simply. i think (though this is a totally different style of story) the better short story writer is franz kafka. his (somewhat cynical) view of humanity is absolutely great. and for that simplistic type of writing that hemingway specializes in, i'd rather go for the works of albert camus. this is not to say that hemingway is not without his strengths. his books i have always thoroughly enjoyed, and the short stories are not BAD, they are actually quite good, i just dont' think they live up to the hype that surrounds them.

This collection of short stories defines what great short fiction is. Hemmingway constructs each story with total percision the way a genious archetect builds a perfect house, that is, with utter flawlessness. With a style of writing unique to only him, the great parisian pilgram, avid fisherman and chronicler of bullfighting gives us a timeless collection of literary gems.

Although you can get twice as many stories in the new complete edition, this small paperback is perfect for people who don't want to commit to a hard-cover, or to 300+ pages of a Hemingway novel, or to long chapters. The few 4+ page short stories I read in this collection let me glimpse Hemingway's genius and still have more and want more. There is a nice, short preface to these stories written by EH.

I like the contents, of course, I know Hemingway fairly well. I have his completed works but wanted a complete short story collection to substitute for my separate short story editions. Unfortunatelly, this complete short story collection was damaged in transport and is already disposed of in the waste-paper basket.....

Th wrong book was delivered to me with the cover of the book I had actually ordered! Not impressed! Hopefully this was just a slip up, as my other books arrived perfectly fine and in good shape as described!

Sandison is capitalizing on the rush for books on the 100th anniversary of Hemingway's birth. If you know nothing about Hemingway, the book is valuable, but Sandison's account of the life is a mechanical recitation of facts gleaned from the Lynn and Mellow biographies. Many of the well-reproduced photos lose their effect because of a faux sepia tone or a blue tint. The prose is often turgid, suggesting that Sandison would do well to reread and imitate Hemingway. Authorial or editorial errors abound. To cite from pages 77-80 only, Bumby's nanny is spelled "Rorbach" and "Rohrbach," the Fitzgeralds' daughter is "Scoltie," and "pseudonymous"--difficult enough to pronounce--gets orthographically spanked as "pseudonomymous." The book is good for bedtime reading, but it is not scholarly by a long stretch.

The hefty paperback had what I thought was an insert in its opening cover, but it was the first several pages of my favorite short story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." In trying to read other stories I found the print fine and a real struggle to hold the book without stretching the pages too much for fear of more sections breaking loose and falling out.

Now I haven't read many of Ernest Hemingway's stories though I want to, but I recently read "Hills Like White Elephants" for a college course, and I was surprised at the emotion and subtle meanings that he packed into the story with its sparse and vague discriptions of the surroundings and characters. He truly is a master.

ok- so i have heard SO many rants and raves about hemingway over the years, that i finally decided this summer to thoroughly investigate some. i read the old man and the sea and a farewell to arms years ago,and i liked both of them. then this past summer i read the sun also rises which i thought was very well done too- it took some time to get into but in the end it is a pretty sexy book actually. but everyone told me the short stories are the things to read. so i picked up and read the first 49, and i'm sorry, but i just didn't dig it. some of his stories are nice, such as TSHL of FM, and the snows of kiliman., and the undefeated, but i just did not go for the pages and pages of nick adams. it was very dry, and while i see how some people can appreciate that depiction of "real" humanity at it's rawest, but i feel like it doesn't go deep enough, and sometimes he tries too much to say things too simply. i think (though this is a totally different style of story) the better short story writer is franz kafka. his (somewhat cynical) view of humanity is absolutely great. and for that simplistic type of writing that hemingway specializes in, i'd rather go for the works of albert camus. this is not to say that hemingway is not without his strengths. his books i have always thoroughly enjoyed, and the short stories are not BAD, they are actually quite good, i just dont' think they live up to the hype that surrounds them.

This collection of short stories defines what great short fiction is. Hemmingway constructs each story with total percision the way a genious archetect builds a perfect house, that is, with utter flawlessness. With a style of writing unique to only him, the great parisian pilgram, avid fisherman and chronicler of bullfighting gives us a timeless collection of literary gems.

I bought the first 49 a while back, and then I saw this. This has everything that the first 49 has and also all the rest of his published stories along with some of his unpublished work. However, both volumes are excelent. Hemingway, in my opinion, is the best short story writer of the 20th century. His short stories take up most of his work and they are excellent. Some say that his short stories are more of an essence of his work than his novels, though I tend to disagree. You will not be disappointed with this purchase, as you will enjoy most of the stories, probably dislike some, and read several over and over again.

Although you can get twice as many stories in the new complete edition, this small paperback is perfect for people who don't want to commit to a hard-cover, or to 300+ pages of a Hemingway novel, or to long chapters. The few 4+ page short stories I read in this collection let me glimpse Hemingway's genius and still have more and want more. There is a nice, short preface to these stories written by EH.

Hemingway, with his unique journalistic style, demonstrates in his short prose the efficient use of word and image to portray deeply enigmatic (and usually tragic) characters, situations, and human relationships. Reflective of both Hemingway's personal angst as well as the demons that haunted his times, the stories outline the love, joy, anger, frustration, and lonliness that have accompanied humanity from the start of time. Hemingway would have spoke to the Homeric Greeks as well as he speaks to us today.

I do enjoy Hemingway, but I don't think the Finca Vigia edition adds very much, except to the price. I could have stuck with the un-finca edition and still had everything important. The Short Stories (Scribner Classics)

First of all, it is difficult rating; Some stories deserve 4 maybe 5 stars while others only 2.

Finca Vigia is his home in Cuba ("Lookout Farm"). This book contains 21 stories in addition to the "the first forty-nine"; average length is under ten pages. Some are as short as a thought, a page out of a novel, or unfinished. Many of the stories take place in Florida, Cuba, the Midwest, and Spain and are written in first person; some very early in life.

At times the worldly Hemingway just writes about the mundane, while the next story we may be sitting in an arena watching a graphic bull-fight. The reoccurring subject matter: hunting, war, medicine, tragedy, marriage/relationships, death, fishing, sports, and drinking.

Racial epithets are frequent throughout. Many of the stories can be uninteresting, banal (as if making a report) and confusing (overly informative). He then can make the shift to simple everyday dialog, containing amazing and eloquent observations. He introduces native dialect and uses hidden subjects. Can the stories be traced to his personal experiences? His novels are better.

Wish you well

Scott

I saw that someone complained about the soft paperback cover; it is true. If you buy the paperback, it peels and quickly begins to wear. I take great care of my books, but this cover just falls apart anyway. The paper on the inside feels like it's made out of recycled newspaper. But, can you seriously beat this collection? Every short story that the man has ever written? It is still a great purchase.

I agree that Hemingway wrote well crafted stories. He was definitely a master at this. However, writing stories that hold the readers attention, is a quality that was lacking. Overall, the stories were dull and uninteresting.

Please read the Library Journal review under "Editorial Reviews" above. The "Library Binding" version is incomplete.
the store has mixed together all the user reviews of the different editions. Pay close attention to reviews that discuss the quality of a specific version. Sometimes it is hard to know which version is being described.

Hemingway is the most morbid author I have ever encountered. In this book, almost every chapter is about death. Death, death and more death right throughout the book. Many chapters end going nowhere, as if the author gave up writing the concluding part, or hit the bottle again and forgot all about the story line. With such a fixation on death, one is not surprised that Hemingway blew his brains out.

I would not recommend this book to anyone, other than a manic depressive. It should be on the free list.

I could not get into this book and dreaded trying so I quit ! The stories seem to go nowhere and make no sense. There was nothing to hold on to but instead me trying ot figure out what the hell I just read.

This book is priced at over $CAN 21.00. Say no to the publishers so called agency sales model and ridiculous over priced ebooks. Dont let them hold your Kindle hostage to their greed. Remember when the store pledged that almost all Kindle books would be $9.99 or less. That is a big reason why we bought our Kindles. Dont let greedy publishers pervert this process of technology allowing more reading for less money. Boycott Simon and Schuster / Scribner.

Hemingway has a style of writing that transcends generations. This is a nice complete short story collection.

I had read somewhere that much of Hemingway's early works were lost by his wife at that time on a train trip to meet him. She not only lost the original copies but the carbons as well. What a travesty. I would love to have read a complete collection of ALL of his works, but at least we have what came after that loss.

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber by Ernest Hemingway
It’s interesting that I started reading this short story before the news broke of Cecil the Lion being killed by a Minnesota Dentist. By the leading sentence you probably figured out this story is about hunting, a lion being one of the hunted. I’ve never shot an animal, but I can see how the hunt would be very exciting. Hemingway brought out that excitement, along with the human side of people. There is a surprising end to this story, one that no one would ever know the motive. It keeps you guessing.

you get a good sense of Hemingway's life through these stories, his zest for adventure and his dark side too. The stories are never boring and seldom predictable. He can make a trip into the woods fly fishing where nothing really happens fascinating.