In His Time

Ernest Hemingway, as the author of this graphic adaptation acknowledges, may be culturally out of fashion, but his short stories, especially those that appeared in the first 1924 version of in our time, are timeless. The stories from that edition are, as the cartoonist Jason Novaks writes in his introduction, "the shortest Hemingway ever wrote. Most of them could more properly be described as vignettes. Any one of them taken alone might be better classified as a prose poem; it is only when read together that they achieve a cohesion as 'stories'. In this new adaptation, Novaks finds the graphic equivalent of Hemingway's lean, muscular prose -- stark, punchy, beautifully composed panels that illustrate the understated poetics of those early, famously groundbreaking stories.