A Hemingway Selection

This is a collection of Hemingway's short stories - selected by Dennis Pepper. It isn't clear what links these short stories - to be honest none of them were particularly impressive. Many were published in magazines first, but come from his story story collections - In Our Time and Men Without Women providing the most. Most were written in the period 1923-27, with a couple at the end from 1938.

There were a number of ‘Nick Adams' stories - although despite all featuring Nick Adams they were not very interconnected and didn't appear to be in order - jumping about a bit from stories about his youth to stories at adulthood. (All the Nick Evans stories here (more than those here) are available in a posthumously released collection from 1972.)

Other than these, there were one-off stories set in Italy related to the war, bullfighting (presumably in Spain), a horse-racing story, a boxing story (presumably the USA), a skiing story, etc, so a real mixture.

Also interesting to me were the various appendices which occupied the last 40 or so pages. These included a five page biography timeline of Hemingway's life which tied into when he wrote various stories (those selected here and others) and where the influences and inspirations may have come from.
For example a lot of the Nick Adams stories are set in the place Hemingway's parents holidayed regularly -Walloon Lake in upper Michigan - where they had a cottage.

There were also some reviews of Hemingway's work - paired as one in praise and one critical, then a selection of what Hemingway said about his writing (parts of interviews, or bits of his writing about his writing. There were then some ‘suggested questions' the reader should ask themselves about each story in this book, and info about where these stories were first published.

Overall, this was readable and interesting enough, but it would have been better if I had read the explanatory parts at the back with each story rather than at the end, as I had lost most of the detail from memory by then. I would think a format with the explanatory notes after each story would have been better.

2.5 stars, rounded up.