The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway : The Finca Vigia Edition

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Summary: Give us this day our daily papa
Review: It was a large book, about eight by five and a half inches. It was a stack of pages. If there had been a few dozen more, they would have numbered seven hundred. But the number of pages did not matter. The important thing was that the book was the proper shape that if you were shooting an elephant you could prop your rifle up on it and you might not get gored that time. Or if you were capsized in the river it might float and then you could ride it to shore. But he did not know if it would float. Like the other books he had seen, it had front and back covers of stiff paper and on the front cover was a picture of two men in a boat. The stock was good and white and durable, and outside snow was falling. It was the first snow he had seen in San Diego.

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Summary: yes, that's how it is
Review: No other writer has ever said so much with so few words. This is the best short story writer that ever lived. The novels are great too, especially those first two. The Hemingway style is often talked about but you cannot understand it fully until you have studied these stories. Hemingway often said the greater part of his writing was elimination and the discerning reader will greatly appreciate all he has done to give us such crystal sentences of such sensual and emotional power. They are subtle these stories but that is their power. Hemingway does not rely on tricks as say a nineteenth-century short story writer might, and he does not give you a little moral at the end. His stories work so well for what they refuse to do and that is to tell you how to react or to set you up so that you see just what the author wants you to see. Hemingway wants to show life as we live it and so all the artistry of the previous century is stripped away. Hemingway gives you an experience raw and sometimes the experience is not fully interpretable, and perhaps the truest thing and only thing is simply the emotional feeling the experience leaves us with. Many of his stories are about experiences many have had like the end of our first love and Hemingway tells it so simply and perfectly you will be left saying to yourself,"yes, thats how it is." I don't think too many short story writers are essential reading but there is one who is, Hemingway.

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Summary: doesn't live up to the hype
Review: 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.

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Summary: A "literary trick" of Hemingway
Review: 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!

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Summary: Best collection but not as good as it could be
Review: The Complete Short Stories is a wonderful read. It has the fullest collection of Hemingway's short prose available. However I dispute the validity of some of the publisher's selections - which, it turns out, is what this book really is. "One Trip Across" and "The Tradesman's Return" are interesting but are actually part of To Have and Have Not. "The Last Good Country" is not a short story but an uncompleted novel. "A Train Trip" and "The Porter" are not stories at all but six chapters from an uncompleted novel called A New Slain Knight that he wrote in 1928. "The Strange Country" is also not a story but deleted chapters from Islands in the Stream. Others of his stories were also omitted: many of his early stories from the 1910s and early '20s, the fable "A Divine Gesture," a bullfight story "A Lack of Passion," and several World War II stories, including "A Room on the Garden Side," "The Monument," "Indian County and the White Army," "The Bubble Reputation" and others. Most of these stories have never been published before and it would be nice if a book would come out with all of them. Until then read this one.

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Summary: A master of telling a story
Review: The greatest short story writers history produced so far; Chekov, Gorky, Korolenko, Maupassant, Bashevis Singer, William Trevor and of course Hemingway, were more than anything else masters of this type of fiction. Even if they all wrote other great pieces, they were (Trevor still is) truly dedicated to the short story. Ernest Hemingway even said that he had "never yet set out to write a novel - it's always a short story that moves into being a novel". Hemingway's short stories are of the type of fiction that grows on you - becomes better with time - and can be read over and over again. You are brought into the "Hemingway world", have a scene or an event described so vivid that you are almost present, and when the story is over not much might have happened, but you have been there - you felt it and saw it - it all happened there in front of you. Such a big collection of stories over decades of writing will have a few pieces less good than some of the other most brilliant ones, but they are all interesting. From "A very short story" - only two pages long, but with the essence of what really happened between Hemingway and the Red Cross nurse in Italy, that later was to be A Farewell to Arms - to the best known, like "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", "Hills like White Elephants", "Cat in the Rain" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". Personally I have many other favourites and I will probably come back to them and keep reading Hemingway stories for the rest of my life.

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Summary: truly, he was the master
Review: the only complete collection of hemingway's short stories. and he was the master of the short story. this is a collection that should be on everyone's shelf. there is nothing i can say, you have to read it.

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Summary: Truly Beautiful Book in Every Way,even the Cover Design!!!!
Review: There are some fine reviews here already. This must be the BEST Hemingway collection out there,starting with the preface by John, Patrick, and Gregory Hemingway. Honestly, it is difficult in the TV-age perhaps for many to appreciate what Hem meant to his generation. There seems to be no author alive (at least American) who represents his era like EH. It may be that some of his novels today may seem a little dated ("Sun Also Rises","Green Hills", "Across the River"-which was panned in the 50's, even "Old Man in the Sea"), but his best stories will always stand the test of time. The first piece here "The Short Happy Life..." I found truly startling long ago,and still do. Who else could describe such a bitter marriage in a big game hunting environment? Not to mention, imagining how animals think! Even a very short piece like "The Killers" has been made into at least two semi-classic movies. And is there a better description of a young man alone in the woods than "Big Hearted River"? Just about all of EH's lifetime interests are here,from Indians in Michigan, the downtrodden with a heart of gold,skiing in the Alps, the struggles of newly weds, father and son relationships, the mindless boredom of war, you name it, the list goes on...This is the best book by our greatest writer, and is almost a necessity for anyone of any age!

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Summary: Excellant addition to any Hemingway collection
Review: 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.

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Summary: Not the complete short stories
Review: This book is good coverage of most of Hemingway's short stories, but it is not complete. Several published Hemingway short stories are not included in this volume. This book was published by his sons; I don't know why they left some stories out, but compare this book to "Men Without Women" and notice the number of missing works just between these two books. I'll bet there are more.