Men Without Women

His second short story collection "Men Without Women" is one of Hemingway's earliest experiments in the small forms of prose. The stories revolve around events and things that happened in the writer's own life. These include bullfighting, boxing, war, male-female relationships, and even gangster themes. According to critics, one of the best stories in the collection is dedicated to the famous matador Maera (Manuel Garcia Lopez), in which Hemingway describes the feelings of a real macho man who realizes the onset of old age and the impossibility of further exploits in the arena. And yet he signs up for the fight, realizing that it will be his last. Some of the stories continue the biography of Nick Adams, a kind of alter ego of the writer himself and the protagonist of the no less famous collection "In Our Time".