In celebration of the Ken Burns documentary on PBS, here’s one of Papa’s most-loved collections of short stories. In these tales, Nick (basically Hemingway) grapples with questions of love and death and the mysteries of nature, goes to war, and comes home damaged. The stories look like staccato snapshots of the obvious, many of them macho or racist, but they’re not. The questions and themes are as big as the universe. Hemingway the man may be a dead white male with a damaged reputation, but Hemingway the writer produced some of the best short stories in the history of the English language. Many of them are in this volume. Reviewed on April 15, 2021