The Short Stories: Volume 2: Audio CD Information

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1314792

The Short Stories: Volume 2: Audio CD

The second volume of unabridged short stories from the masterful mind of Hemingway.Unabridged. 5 CDs.

Annotation:
The definitive collection of the stories of Ernest Hemingway, with a preface by the author, originally published in 1938. Hemingway's short stories are considered his best work because of their controlled economy, the simplicity of their language, and Hemingway's constant struggle to get to the truth in a situation.

Praise

New Yorker
"I don't see how you can go through this book without being convinced that Hemingway is the best short story writer...using English." - Clifton Fadiman

Times Literary Supplement
"His short stories, written in the 1920s and 30s, blending complexity with radically new expression, rank him along with Chekhov, Joyce and Kipling as one of the great masters of the form." - William Boyd 07/02/199

Author Bio

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway played football in high school and was a lifelong sportsman, obsessed from his youth with hunting and fishing, but had no formal education after Oak Park High. He drove an ambulance in France in World War I and also served (and was wounded) in the Italian army. After the war, he was a reporter for the "Toronto Star". In the 1920s, he settled in Paris as part of the group of American expatriates who formed Gertrude Stein's circle. She was an enormous influence on his writing, teaching the virtue of the simple declarative sentence. He was also influenced by Ezra Pound, whom he revered, and became friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald (a stormy friendship, which did not endure). His first American publication was the group of stories, "In Our Time" (1925), in which the concerns and values of the so-called "lost generation" were articulated for the first time: their postwar disillusionment; their cynical, stoic endurance in the face of pain; their brutal honesty; and their distance from emotional involvement. Hemingway moved back to the U.S. in the later '20s, and began to write novels; his first great success was "The Sun Also Rises" in 1926. He moved to Key West in 1928; from that base, he often visited Spain, where he became an aficionado of bullfighting, and went on safari in Africa. He covered the Spanish Civil War as a reporter, then moved to Cuba in the 1940s, where he kept an estate until a group of revolutionaries killed his beloved dog. Hemingway had four wives and fathered three sons. He became one of the century's most influential writers. (Nabokov once commented that Hemingway wrote about "bells, bulls, and balls.") His fame culminated in a 1952 Pulitzer Prize for "The Old Man and the Sea", and the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954. All his life, he had phobias about taxes, telephones, and speaking in public: He accepted the Nobel Prize in absentia. ("A writer should write what he has to say, not speak it.") A heavy drinker, Hemingway was ill, both physically and mentally, for several years at the end of his life; his debilitated physical state was worsened after a plane crash en route to his fifth African safari, in which he was seriously injured, including a ruptured liver and kidney, broken bones, a concussion, first-degree burns, and vision and hearing loss. Delusional and unable to write, he endured a variety of treatments, including shock therapy at the Mayo Clinic. Finally, depressed and frustrated, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a double-barreled shotgun weeks before his 62nd birthday.

Read A Chapter

Preface

The first four stories are the last ones I have written. The others follow in the order in which they were originally published.

The first one I wrote was Up in Michigan, written in Paris in 1921. The last was Old Man at the Bridge cabled from Barcelona in April of 1938.

Beside The Fifth Column, I wrote The Killers, Today Is Friday, Ten Indians, part of The Sun Also Rises and the first third of To Have and Have Not in Madrid. It was always a good place for working. So was Paris, and so were Key West, Florida, in the cool months; the ranch, near Cooke City, Montana; Kansas City; Chicago; Toronto, and Havana, Cuba.

Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.

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Preface

The first four stories are the last ones I have written. The others follow in the order in which they were originally published.

The first one I wrote was Up in Michigan, written in Paris in 1921. The last was Old Man at the Bridge cabled from Barcelona in April of 1938.

Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.

There are many kinds of stories in this book. I hope that you will find some that you like. Reading them over, the ones I liked the best, outside of those that have achieved some notoriety so that school teachers include them in story collections that their pupils have to buy in story courses, and you are always faintly embarrassed to read them and wonder whether you really wrote them or did you maybe hear them somewhere, are The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, In Another Country, Hills Like White Elephants, A Way You'll Never Be, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, and a story called The Light of the World which nobody else ever liked. There are some others too. Because if you did not like them you would not publish them.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

Now it is necessary to get to the grindstone again. I would like to live long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories. I know some pretty good ones.

Ernest Hemingway

1938

"The Battler"; "Big Two-Hearted River: Part I"; "Big Two-Hearted River: Part II"; "Cat in the Rain"; "Cross-Country Snow"; "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife"; "The End of Something"; "Indian Camp"; "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot"; "My Old Man"; "Out of Season";

"The Revolutionist"; "Soldier's Home"; "The Three-Day Blow";

"Banal Story"; "A Canary for One"; "Hills Like White Elephants"; "In Another Country"; "The Killers"; "Now I Lay Me"; "A Pursuit Race"; "A Simple Enquiry"; "Ten Indians"; "Today Is Friday"; "The Undefeated"; copyright © 1927 Charles Scribner's Sons; renewal copyright © 1955 Ernest Hemingway

"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"; "A Day's Wait"; "Fathers and Sons"; "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio"; "Homage to Switzerland"; "The Light of the World"; "The Mother of a Queen"; "One Reader Writes"; "The Sea Change"; "A Way You'll Never Be" copyright © 1933 Charles Scribner's Sons;

"Capital of the World" was first published under the title "The Horns of the Bull."

"The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" was first published under the title "Give Us A Prescription, Doctor."

Continues...

Excerpted from The Short Stories Volume IIby Ernest Hemingway Copyright © 2002 by Ernest Hemingway. Excerpted by permission.
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