In Our Time

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.