The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

No writer did more to reshape the short story in the twentieth century than Hemingway, and this definitive collection demonstrates why. From the Nick Adams stories of his Michigan boyhood to the African tales of his middle age, his range is wider than his reputation for minimalism suggests. The iceberg theory is everywhere: what is said matters, but what is deliberately omitted carries the emotional weight. Hills Like White Elephants, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber — these are among the most perfectly constructed pieces of short fiction in the language. What Hemingway understood was that the most devastating truths announce themselves in the silences between ordinary sentences.

These stories are the foundation on which The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms were built—essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Hemingway's evolution as an artist.