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I haven’t read anywhere close to the full set of Hemingway’s short stories - slowly chipping away, so might as well get some on the board. I have done the super classics, and this collection actually contains a couple of them.

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is quite possibly my favourite Hemingway story of all time. Seriously, I am in awe of how much he does with a few pages. I think I go through a whole range of emotions every time I read it. Why? Well� like I said, admiration for Hemingway’s choice of setting and character. Some random bar, very late night, close to closing time. Old man. Solitude. Regret? Sadness? Empathy? Apathy? Life? Fuck me.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro is beautiful too, as is A Day’s Wait. Come to think of it, there is a theme in the ones that I find most impactful. Hemingway Heads, I was also going to say that I enjoyed Fathers and Sons and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Yes. Yes there is definitely a theme. I can’t help it; I’m just fascinated thinking about how death looms over us all, how we deal with it, make sense of it, go out to greet it. In that sense, this is about as good a collection of short stories as you can get. I often find it really difficult to give any collection of stories 5 stars, because that would imply that it was damn near perfect. This isn’t. No nadirs, but a couple of stories that phoned it in for me.