Men Without Women

Classic, beautiful Hemingway. This is a set of fourteen short stories he wrote, all profiles of masculinity of different types (of his age) — bullfighting and prize fighting in stories like “Fifty Grand” and topics like divorce, war, injury, murder and loss, abortion and divorce, all from the perspective of the male. It’s akin to the power of the silent note in music — the absence of the feminine throughout the book is so striking that it looms over every paragraph, and is therefore itself emergent as the book’s main character. It’s dark, uncomfortable, abrasively funny at times, “language sheered to the bone,” as the New York Times summarized it.