In our time

This is a 1925 collection of short fiction from Boni & Liveright, the first of Ernest Hemingway's books to appear in the United States. It holds fourteen stories, and between them sit eighteen very short vignettes first printed in an earlier Paris edition.

The vignettes are terse sketches of war, bullfighting and violence. They do not tell a story directly. They sit alongside the longer pieces and comment on them.

Several stories follow Nick Adams, starting with his boyhood in northern Michigan and continuing into the years after the First World War. His thread is one of loss and alienation, and of how hard it is to settle back into ordinary life. Other stories, among them Cat in the Rain and Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, look at marriages under strain and at people drifting through postwar Europe.

The prose is spare and understated, in the style Hemingway later called the theory of omission. Much is left unsaid, and the reader fills the gaps. The book is regarded as a founding work of American literary modernism, and it set the voice that his later novels would carry. Reading it means short, quiet pieces that can be taken one at a time or in sequence.