Recommendations
Books Like In Our Time
Best books to read after In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
In Our Time is Hemingway's breakthrough — the collection that established his prose method and the iceberg theory that would define American short fiction for the next generation. If the compression, the implication, and the emotional territory of the Nick Adams stories moved you, these books share his formal innovation, his portrait of the aftermath of World War I, and his ability to say the important things by not saying them.
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The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
The natural next step from In Our Time — the same themes of war damage, sexual wound, and the search for meaning through activity extended into a full-length narrative; Jake Barnes in Paris and Pamplona is Nick Adams grown up and the iceberg method applied to a complete novel
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A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's most perfectly structured novel — a love story set against the Italian campaign of World War I, with the compressed tragic sensibility of the best Nick Adams stories sustained across a full narrative; the fullest expression of the worldview In Our Time establishes
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The Big Two-Hearted River
by Ernest Hemingway
The two-part Nick Adams story from In Our Time that is the fullest statement of the iceberg method — a story about a man fishing in Michigan that is entirely about something else; recommended for readers who want to understand exactly how the method works before reading the novels
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Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson
Anderson's linked story collection was a direct influence on Hemingway's early fiction and the American precursor to the formal innovation of In Our Time; where Hemingway's characters suppress their inner life through compression, Anderson's characters are defined by the inability to express what they feel
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Dubliners
by James Joyce
Joyce's collection of Dublin stories — with its emphasis on epiphany, its use of the gap between what is said and what is meant, and its formal compression — is the European parallel to In Our Time and one of the essential modernist short story collections; Hemingway read Joyce carefully and the influence is visible
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The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
O'Brien's linked fiction about American soldiers in Vietnam is the most important contemporary heir to In Our Time's formal innovation — the alternation between realistic narrative and brief vignettes, the concern with what war actually does to the people who fight it, and the use of the gap between what is said and what is withheld as the primary formal strategy
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Cathedral
by Raymond Carver
Carver's short stories are the most direct American heir to Hemingway's iceberg method — characters in domestic situations that are explicitly about one thing and implicitly about something much larger, rendered in prose of extraordinary compression; the line from In Our Time to Carver's 'Cathedral' is the most direct in American short fiction
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Men Without Women
by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's second story collection — published two years after In Our Time — and the one that most fully develops the formal innovations of the earlier book; contains 'Hills Like White Elephants' and 'The Killers,' two of the most perfectly realized examples of the iceberg method in his entire career
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