[Note: a full review may or may not be forthcoming. I'll never do it justice. The TL;DR; is - Read this. It's amazing. It's beautiful. It's tragic. It's the best stuff I've ever read.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway - The Finca Vigia Edition contains some of the best literature I've ever read. It's a monster -- the hardcover version is 650 pages long and contains 60 stories in total, including seven stories not previously published. Three friends of mine and I read through it together, as an informal book club, aiming for one story per week. It ended up taking us over two years to finally get through every one of them.

Finishing the final story felt like finishing Moby Dick, both in terms of the undertaking itself, but also because of the significance of its place in the canon of American and English language literature. Though Hemingway's style and (possibly self-aggrandized) persona have become their own cliches, his prose speaks for itself. Yes, it's sparse, journalistic, and declarative as everyone knows, but what makes it so moving is how he can explore the depths of the human condition, the deep pains of humanity, and that he can somehow force you to feel it deeply with both what's said in the prose and, indeed, what he hasn't said.

Some of the stories in the collection -- mostly those from earlier in his career -- are the most profound stories you'll read in the English language. 'Hills Like White Elephants', 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place', 'Indian Camp', 'Up in Michigan', 'Big Two-Hearted River', and 'The Killers' are just a few.

It's not just the story -- it's what he's able to do with the language in just a few pages!