“Stop listening to those golden harps, Swede” “The Killers” is a dialogue-driven short story by Ernest Hemingway that describes the melancholic criminal comeuppance of a man long-removed from the deeds that signed his death warrant. It reads like a fast-paced and stripped-down script whose intrigue is built out of that which we’ll never know. Context provides motivations rather than meaning, the underlying sorrow ingrained within its matter-of-fact, gangster machinations conjuring existential empathy rather than good versus evil justice. The men tasked with killing a Brentwood resident they’ve never met aren’t…
Read MoreREVIEW: The Killers [1946]
