Hello folks! We’ve just sent this month’s Hermine Classic Short Read to newsletter subscribers. “Out of Season” originally appeared in Three Stories and Ten Poems, published by Contact Publishing in 1923, and later included in the In Our Time collection.
Everyone knows the famous suitcase story. The thought of those lost Hemingway stories sends the mind reeling even now, but there was a bit of advice Ezra Pound gave Hemingway that’s instructive far beyond that specific situation, a handy framework one might use when trying to assess whether one’s own stories are any good:
“If the middle, i.e., FORM, of the story is right then one ought to be able to reassemble it from memory … If the thing wobbles and won’t reform … then it never wd. have been right.” — Pound to Hemingway, (Smith, Paul. [1996] “1924: Hemingway’s Luggage and the Miraculous Year”, in The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. Donaldson, Scott (ed). New York: Cambridge UP
If you missed this ebook edition of “Out of Season”, you can still grab it from the archives. Be sure to sign up for the entire free series as well, and you’ll receive a new (old) short story in your inbox at the end of each month.