The collection of stories and sketches that go by the title “in our time” has a convoluted publication history. Originally a series of six vignettes published by Ezra Pound in the 1923 edition of the Little Review, Hemingway added twelve more and published a collection of eighteen vignettes in Paris in 1924 under the title of in our time (with a lowercase title). This audiobook is a reading of this edition.

The book began in the summer of 1923, when Hemingway traveled to Spain and developed a passion for bullfighting. He was inspired to write five sketches about the subject. Other short pieces were also written during this time. Returning to Paris, he submitted the pieces to his friend Bruce Bird at Three Mountains Press, who put together a small book of thirty-one pages with lots of white space and an intentionally unconventional cover. Originally submitted without a title, Ezra Pound dubbed “Blank” the title. “in our time” was eventually chosen as the title and comes from a line in the English Book of Common Prayer, “Give peace in our time, O Lord”. The work shows the distinctive Hemingway style of spare language and oblique depictions of emotion that he called his “theory of omission”, or “iceberg theory”.  Hemingway scholar Milton Common has said that “the visual suddenness intensifies its narrative abruptness, heightens the shock of violence, and the chillingly matter-of-fact tongue”. In 1925 Hemingway submitted fourteen short stories with the vignettes interleaved between the stories to New York publishers Boni & Liveright, who published them as In Our Time (uppercase). This expanded version attracted further critical notice and established Hemingway as an important voice in modern literature, with Edmund Wilson commenting that it was “of the first distinction”.

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