Men Without Women: Ernest Hemingway (Arrow Classic S)

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I had two short story collections before me with the title 'Men Without Women', one by Ernest Hemingway, the other by Haruki Murakami. I went with Hemingway's because it was slimmer and had a nice cover photograph of some men sitting at a doorway drinking beer and smoking cigarettes (yeah, I'm shallow that way). One of the first books I read in the genre of literary fiction is the old man and the sea, gifted to me by my father. From that day onwards, Hemingway has been one of my favorite authors. Hemingway beautifully explores some apprehensive relationships between men and women in this collection of short stories. The author portrays men without women due to many reasons in this book. One person's wife died while the other person was betrayed by his girlfriend. We can also see how society looked at abortion in the 1920s. There are deeper meanings embedded in each story which makes you contemplate a lot after reading it. This is a book you should never miss if you loved books like, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway or Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami. First edition, first printing, of Hemingway's collection of 14 stories in which, as noted by the blurb, "the softening feminine influence is almost wholly absent - either through training, discipline, death, or situation". It may be blasphemous to many, but this collection was in the latter camp, hence it took me a long time to read a very short book. I just couldn't engage with the characters, plots (I hate bullfighting and boxing, which set me against a couple of them) or writing style, the latter being mostly such short sentences that it was almost like reading a child's book. In other hands, such sentences might be pleasingly spare, but here, they just annoyed me.

There’s a dialled-down quality to these men. Their exchanges with other people are limited to bedrooms and bars. They have one eccentricity each: they care about reading or cooking or the history of popular music. Murakami Man, we begin to see, has no friends because, in the pursuit of convenience and emotional self-protection, in proofing himself against grief, he chose distance. He chose loneliness long before he experienced loss. As a result, he is unable to take advantage of the predictable life he has been at such pains to organise. If he fails to connect with others, he fails, equally, to connect with himself.The girl looked across at the hills.‘They’re lovely hills,’ she said. ‘They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the colouring of their skin through the trees.’ in the following periodicals: The American Caravan, The Atlantic Monthly, The Little Review, The New Republic, La Nouvelle Revue Française, This Quarter, Der Querschnitt,

Sex in fiction is not the same as sex in real life: when Catherine and David play with gender, they are not just a straight couple wandering into faintly kinky waters. They are transforming, hiding shifting bodies, loves and queerness behind Hemingway’s stark sentences. The scene is, unmistakably, a fantasy of gay sex, and a microcosm of Hemingway’s anxiety, tension, and fascination with the muddy waters of queer sexuality. He is drawn towards queerness and repelled in the same moment; he can accept a romantic male friendship, but squirms at that last step toward transgression. Long, Ray - editor. (1932). "Why Editors Go Wrong: ' Fifty Grand' by Ernest Hemingway", 20 Best Stories in Ray Long's 20 Years as an Editor. New York: Crown Publishers. 1-3 It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig ,’ the man said. ‘ It’s not really an operation at all.’ I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants , and you’ll like it?’This influential 14-story collection includes some of the Nobel laureate’s most notable short fiction, including “Hills Like White Elephants” and “Fifty Grand,” which a Cosmopolitan editor praised as “one of the best short stories that ever came to my hands.” Read by an Earphones Award–winning narrator. 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 book is a collection of a number of short stories, each one mainly focusing on men going through certain stages of life. Some were men old in their profession and yet hanging on, some soldiers or military men around World War 1. The stories weren't necessarily connected, but each story made me think about the characters, their feelings, all the words that were left to interpretation and weren't told by the author. I really liked that. The book demanded my utmost attention and yet made it enjoyable. It was more than entertainment.

Well,’ the man said, ‘if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.’ Fifty Grand” resembles a story, “A Matter of Colour,” Hem published in his high school literary magazine, Tabula, when he attended Oak Park High School (which I, name dropper, mention because it is near my house, and where they have a small shrine to the local hero outside the school). The story is one of a fight fix gone badly, and is really wonderful. Now imagine how different Hemingway's writing would have been if he'd been born today in the age of X-Box, Nuts Magazine and alcopops... After his divorce of 1927 from Hadley Richardson, Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer. At the Spanish civil war, he acted as a journalist; afterward, they divorced, and he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida, and Cuba during the 1930s and 1940s.

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Originally published in October 1927, the second short-story collection published by Pulitzer Prize winner and Nobel Laureate Ernest Hemingway contains the following fourteen stories: The aim of this book is not to have the final word on the meaning of the stories that compose Men Without Women. Rather, the study attempts to probe the events of each story as we encounter them. It seeks to explain historical references, to identify allusions, to see how form suggests meaning.”—From the Preface Hemingway's first two published works were Three Stories and Ten Poems and In Our Time but it was the satirical novel, The Torrents of Spring, that established his name more widely. His international reputation was firmly secured by his next three books; Fiesta, Men Without Women and A Farewell to Arms. Men Without Women was variously received by critics. Cosmopolitan magazine editor-in-chief Ray Long praised the story "Fifty Grand", calling it, "one of the best short stories that ever came to my hands...the best prize-fight story I ever read...a remarkable piece of realism." [4] Each story within this small book had a message and each message was pretty darn dark and sad, but poignant.