The greatest short story writers history produced so far; Chekov, Gorky, Korolenko, Maupassant, Bashevis Singer, William Trevor and of course Hemingway, were more than anything else masters of this type of fiction. Even if they all wrote other great pieces, they were (Trevor still is) truly dedicated to the short story. Ernest Hemingway even said that he had "never yet set out to write a novel - it's always a short story that moves into being a novel". Hemingway's short stories are of the type of fiction that grows on you - becomes better with time - and can be read over and over again. You are brought into the "Hemingway world", have a scene or an event described so vivid that you are almost present, and when the story is over not much might have happened, but you have been there - you felt it and saw it - it all happened there in front of you. Such a big collection of stories over decades of writing will have a few pieces less good than some of the other most brilliant ones, but they are all interesting. From "A very short story" - only two pages long, but with the essence of what really happened between Hemingway and the Red Cross nurse in Italy, that later was to be A Farewell to Arms - to the best known, like "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", "Hills like White Elephants", "Cat in the Rain" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". Personally I have many other favourites and I will probably come back to them and keep reading Hemingway stories for the rest of my life.
