It's a good thing the stories are arranged chronologically, otherwise their unevenness would be infuriating. Now, there's a clear progression from the almost pointless stories written in his youth to the poignant ones written almost 20 years later. What I was thinking about most of the time reading the stories, however, was how much the world has changed since those times. Hemingway lived abroad and most of his stories are situated there. That's almost unthinkable for an American writer these days; they sit tight in America and never much acknowledge that there's a world outside of their country.