’In Our Time’, Hemingway’s first book, was published in the experimental Paris of the early 1920s. It contains 14 short stories and 18 ‘vignettes’ – or one and 2 paragraph prose poems, moments. The whole thing refers directly or indirectly to the Great War, its killing and brutality and shattering aftermath.
Few books have announced the arrival of a complete style which has gone on to change the way virtually everyone writes. Compared with the floribund Victorians of only a generation earlier, or the Georgian Sassoon and Blunden, trying to preserve their English idyll, Hemingway, aged just 25, has grasped the real nature of the 20th century and invented a new world and a new style to express it. A stunning, amazing achievement. A truly seminal book.
Books & Boots 