<i>Editor's note: This story originally appeared in the June 5, 2004 edition of The Kansas City Star</i></p><p></p><p>You'd think that a book called <i>In Our Time</i> and written some 80 years ago might have scant interest for readers in our time. Today, that is. </p><p></p><p>But great literature lasts because it speaks across time. </p><p></p><p>Ernest Hemingway was barely 26 years old when his first book of short stories appeared in the United States in 1925. Hemingway was living the postwar, ex-pat life in Paris then, and some of his poems and small pieces first saw light there. But <i>In Our Time</i> served to announce Hemingway's arrival on the American literary scene. </p><p>A book critic for The Kansas City Star, where Hemingway had toiled as a cub reporter eight years earlier, hailed Hemingway's voice as something new: "The short sentences bite like acid; the infrequent expletives snarl and rumble like loaded trucks under a viaduct." </p><p></p><p>For readers today, the Hemingway stories of <i>In Our Time</i> resound with familiar, iconic images. And that's one reason The Star has made the book this month's FYI Book Club selection. Your reading assignment also coincides with Hemingway's birthday anniversary July 21; he was born in Oak Park, Ill., 105 years ago. </p><p></p><p>Perhaps you first encountered Nick Adams in the classroom long ago: Nick Adams, the boy who becomes a man in the course of <i>In Our Time</i>. Nick Adams, who is witness, in these stories, to birth and death and all the heartache in between that you can stand. Nick Adams, whose fishing trip into the woods of Michigan at the end of the book stands for a generation traumatized by war. </p><p></p><p>Is <i>In Our Time</i> timely? </p><p></p><p>Like the seasons and the cycles of life. </p><p></p><p>"<i>In Our Time</i> is one of the great coming-of-age books," says Scott Donaldson, a prominent Hemingway biographer and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. "The stories, brilliant individually, are strung together on the jangling nerves of a youth confronted by a world he never made. Hemingway calls him Nick Adams, but he bears an uncanny resemblance to Hemingway, and he stands for the rest of us, too, as we shuck off our confident illusions and graduate into manhood." </p><p></p><p>The book still has the look of a modernist experiment, which challenges readers to decode Hemingway's ideas and intentions and put the pieces together in meaningful ways. Start with the title: It's meant to echo, ironically, a line from the Book of Common Prayer: "Oh Lord, let there be peace in our time." </p><p></p><p>Sixteen short stories are woven together with the same number of vignettes. The vignettes, all less than a page long and often just a paragraph or two, have echoes of Hemingway's journalism, which he had practiced in Kansas City, Toronto and in Europe in the early 1920s. They describe refugees fleeing the Greco-Turkish war and the ways of bullfighters in the ring. They capture the voices of soldiers during combat and tough Kansas City cops. </p><p></p><p>The interplay of the vignettes and the longer stories is a never-ending source of study for graduate students everywhere. But to everyday readers the vignettes also can be approached as finely chiseled, modernist prose poems, which help punctuate the longer stories that surround them. </p><p></p><p>The longer, titled stories include some of Hemingway's best and best-known early work: "Indian Camp," about a boy who accompanies his physician father to an emergency birthing in the woods; "Soldier's Home," which depicts a Marine, back from the war, struggling to come to grips with Midwestern conformity and an uncertain future; and "Big Two-Hearted River," a story in two parts, which follows a meditative Nick Adams into his beloved woods to camp and fish for trout.