The best part of Hemingway's classic memoir may be the setting: 1920s Paris. In this series of sketches, Hemingway remembers what it was like to be a young, struggling artist in Paris during that time, surrounded by a host of literary greats including Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Beach, Ezra Pound ... the list goes on. The prose is quintessential Hemingway: spare and precise, with every word pulling its weight. (No wonder so many writers cite this slim volume as a favorite.) Pick this up if you want to feel city life leaping from the page.

Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley are two of Hemingway's most well-known characters. The novel examines the disenchantment of the post-war generation as it follows the expatriates through Spanish bullfights to Paris jazz clubs. Hemingway's classic story of the Lost Generation has been banned around the US, and Hemingway's works were burned in Germany in the 1930s, for being "monuments to modern decadence."

Hemingway released three different editions of this iconic short story collection, which also includes his famous Nick Adams stories. The stories alternate between northern Michigan and WWI and explore grief, separation, and alienation. My first introduction to these stories was in a summer literature program where a professor incited a fiery discussion by asserting a line from "Soldiers Home" was the best ever written in the English language: "Krebs looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate." I may have other ideas for superlatives, but I've never forgotten In Our Time.