The Sun Also Rises and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Learn more



or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering
Sell Us Your Item
For a $2.00 Gift Card
Trade in
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Start reading The Sun Also Rises on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Sorry, this item is not available in
Image not available for
Color:
Image not available

To view this video download Flash Player

 

The Sun Also Rises [Paperback]

Ernest Hemingway
3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (722 customer reviews)

List Price: $15.00
Price: $12.45 & FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $2.55 (17%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
Want it tomorrow, June 20? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details
Summer Reading
Summer Reading
Browse the best books of summer including blockbusters, beach reads, and editors' picks in our Summer Reading Store.

Book Description

October 17, 2006
The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises is one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style. A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises helped to establish Hemingway as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

Best Value

Buy The Sun Also Rises and get A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition at an additional 5% off Amazon.com's everyday low price.

The Sun Also Rises + A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition
Buy together today: $23.53

Show availability and shipping details

  • This item: The Sun Also Rises

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details



Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Sun Also Rises first appeared in 1926, and yet it's as fresh and clean and fine as it ever was, maybe finer. Hemingway's famously plain declarative sentences linger in the mind like poetry: "Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that." His cast of thirtysomething dissolute expatriates--Brett and her drunken fiancé, Mike Campbell, the unhappy Princeton Jewish boxer Robert Cohn, the sardonic novelist Bill Gorton--are as familiar as the "cool crowd" we all once knew. No wonder this quintessential lost-generation novel has inspired several generations of imitators, in style as well as lifestyle.

Jake Barnes, Hemingway's narrator with a mysterious war wound that has left him sexually incapable, is the heart and soul of the book. Brett, the beautiful, doomed English woman he adores, provides the glamour of natural chic and sexual unattainability. Alcohol and post-World War I anomie fuel the plot: weary of drinking and dancing in Paris cafés, the expatriate gang decamps for the Spanish town of Pamplona for the "wonderful nightmare" of a week-long fiesta. Brett, with fiancé and ex-lover Cohn in tow, breaks hearts all around until she falls, briefly, for the handsome teenage bullfighter Pedro Romero. "My God! he's a lovely boy," she tells Jake. "And how I would love to see him get into those clothes. He must use a shoe-horn." Whereupon the party disbands.

But what's most shocking about the book is its lean, adjective-free style. The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's masterpiece--one of them, anyway--and no matter how many times you've read it or how you feel about the manners and morals of the characters, you won't be able to resist its spell. This is a classic that really does live up to its reputation. --David Laskin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

The publisher is using these two perennial favorites to launch its new Scribner Paperback Fiction line. This edition of Paradise marks the 75th anniversary of the smash 1920 first novel that skyrocketed Fitzgerald to literary stardom at the ripe old age of 23. Several years later, The Sun (1926), Hemingway's own first novel, performed an identical service for him at age 26. The line will eventually include additional titles by these giants as well as works by Edith Wharton, Langston Hughes, and other greats.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 251 pages
  • Publisher: Scribner (October 17, 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0743297334
  • ISBN-13: 978-0743297332
  • Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.5 x 8.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (722 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #332 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ernest Hemingway ranks as the most famous of twentieth-century American writers; like Mark Twain, Hemingway is one of those rare authors most people know about, whether they have read him or not. The difference is that Twain, with his white suit, ubiquitous cigar, and easy wit, survives in the public imagination as a basically, lovable figure, while the deeply imprinted image of Hemingway as rugged and macho has been much less universally admired, for all his fame. Hemingway has been regarded less as a writer dedicated to his craft than as a man of action who happened to be afflicted with genius. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1954, Time magazine reported the news under Heroes rather than Books and went on to describe the author as "a globe-trotting expert on bullfights, booze, women, wars, big game hunting, deep sea fishing, and courage." Hemingway did in fact address all those subjects in his books, and he acquired his expertise through well-reported acts of participation as well as of observation; by going to all the wars of his time, hunting and fishing for great beasts, marrying four times, occasionally getting into fistfights, drinking too much, and becoming, in the end, a worldwide celebrity recognizable for his signature beard and challenging physical pursuits.

Customer Reviews

So even though page after page of this book was boring to the point of tears, I kept reading. Raoul Duke  |  57 reviewers made a similar statement
The characters Lady Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes are memorable. danielle  |  66 reviewers made a similar statement
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
258 of 279 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Hemingway's First Masterpiece! March 6, 2001
Format:Paperback
This, friends, was the single book that so fatefully launched Ernest Hemingway's amazing and long-lived literary career. As such it is as close to being a legendary book as they come, yet some seventy five years after its initial publication, it still offers a story that is also surprisingly fresh, personal, and memorable. For all of his obvious excesses, Hemingway was an artist compelled to delve deliberately into painful truths, and he attempted to do so with a style of writing that cut away all of the frills and artifice, so that at it s heart this novel is meant as a exploration into what it means to be adult and alive. Thus we are introduced to Jake Barnes, a veteran of World War One, now forced by his wounds to live as a man without the ability to act like one, forced by impotence to forgo all of life's usual intimacies, and all of its associated life connections for which he so yearns. At the same time, Jake attempts to live a life of meaning and purpose, one crammed full with activity, work, and friendships. Yet it is within this network of friendships and connections that he must confront his painful circumstances.

Enter his true love, the feckless Lady Ashley, and indeed the plot thickens, for we soon see how Jake's physical affliction has painfully affected several others. Ashley loves him, but needs a virile man who can give her the physical love she needs. While Ashley is a woman of uncommon beauty, she is also virtuous enough in her won way to want the one man she truly loves to be her lover. Like all of us, she wants most that which she can never have, and so she returns to the source of her own dilemma time after time to Jake, her emotional match, the one man who cannot give her the mature emotional love she craves....

Yet for all this emotional turmoil and existential `sturm-und-drang' of the so-called "lost generation", people drowning in the moral anomie and circumstantial wasteland created in the gutters of their own endless wants and needs, it is most often Hemingway's imaginative and spare use of the language itself that wins the reader over. Unlike his predecessors, he sought a lean narrative style that cut away at all the flowery description and endless adjectives. In the process of parsing away the excesses, Hemingway created a clear, simple and quite declarative prose style that was truly both modern and revolutionary. What one encounters as a result is a story seemingly stripped to its barest essentials, superficially more like the newspaper man's pantheon of who, what, where, when, and why, and yet somehow transformed into a much more accurate and imaginative effort, one leaving the reader with a much more artful account of what is going on. One reads Hemingway quickly, at least at first, when one learns to slow down and drink in every word and every detail as it is related. For me and for millions of others, the true genius of Hemingway is to be found in his artful use of language. This book was Hemingway's first truly successful foray into the world of letters, and the result changed the face of modern fiction. Enjoy! Read more ›

Was this review helpful to you?
82 of 87 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Hemingway rules! Rargh! February 26, 2002
Format:Paperback
The Sun Also Rises is one of the few works of literature that shook me to the core, along with Remarque's Three Comrades, Gorky's autobiography, and Chekhov's The Lady With The Dog. I read a page and I was hooked. Bam, just like that. I read the thing in a day. In several hours, actually. And then I went and devoured the rest of the man's literary oeuvre. It's just that great. All the greater because when you really look at it, there's no dramatic action going on here - just some people talking, then going to Spain to see the bullfights. But don't let that fool you - boring this book ain't.

Jake Barnes, like most of the characters, is a veteran of World War I. A very unfortunate wound left physical love a complete impossibility for him, and thus he is left gnashing his teeth watching the woman he loves run around with all sorts of men. The Jewish Robert Cohn, who learned boxing in college in order to conquer his feelings of inferiority, happens to become smitten with her as well. Somehow, they and some of their friends and acquaintances end up going to Spain to experience the Fiesta, and while their experience starts the same giddy, frenzied, hedonistic way as for most people, it ends quite differently, when the book's darker undercurrents come to light. Insert scenes of cafe life, fishing, reminiscences, conversations with friends, watching the bullfights, some absolutely brutal humor, and lots and lots of liquor, and you've got yourself Hemingway's first masterpiece. Every element of every great Hemingway book can be seen here - plenty of vivid descriptions; moments of strange, elegiac melancholy; the human spirit fighting against the world; loneliness, isolation, and endurance. They're all here.

For some reason, this book seems to draw accusations of anti-Semitism....

The Sun Also Rises is the sound of people trying to find a purpose for themselves in an increasingly shallow world. And lest that not convince you to read it, it happens to rock .... Rarely have I read more bitingly acerbic insults and comebacks, wry and cynical remarks, and deadly accurate observations. Actually, rarely have I ever felt so drawn in to the world of a book as much as here. I identified with Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton and that Englishman they met while fishing and with the boozing Mike and with Cohn. I understood their copious drinking and verbal barb-flinging because I was struck by the moments of absolutely believable fragile vulnerability that lay underneath the surface. The subtle gestures, the shifts in tone, the tough, terse prose all added to the various effects when necessary. When I was done, the book left an indelible stamp on my mind. And what higher recommendation could anyone possibly give a book than that? Read more ›

Was this review helpful to you?
92 of 102 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I have mixed feelings about this novel. On one level I appreciate it for the fine literary work that it is. In particular, I admire Hemmingway's use of symbolism throughout the novel. But at the same time, this isn't a novel I enjoyed reading. The novel features a cast of characters that are not especially likable and the first third of the novel moves a little too slowly (Jake and his friends lead aimless lives -and the first part of the novel is pretty aimless).

Jake and his fellow expatriates spend the entire novel getting drunk, being drunk, or recovering from having been drunk (or `tight' as they like to say). They pass their days eating, drinking and being as insensitive as possible to one another. It would be easy to dismiss these characters as unpleasant, and therefore uninteresting, but in the context of the years following WWI, I found myself feeling some sympathy for them.

Simply put, they're damaged goods. Jake, Mike, and Bill all fought in WWI(Jake becoming less of a man as a result) and were forever affected by it. They are now lost, drowning their empty aimless lives in alcohol.

Arguably, the most interesting character in the novel is Lady Ashley (Brett) who is a toxic influence on nearly every man she encounters. Jake, Mike, and Cohn are all in love with her to varying degrees and pay an emotional price as a result. Brett's self centered behaviour complicates the lives of the men who are enamored by her. Jake, who is impotent because of the war, demonstrates his love for Brett by helping her pursue men and then picking up the pieces when the affair ends badly.

There is no happiness for the lost generation in The Sun Also Rises and considerable irony in the novel's final sentence.
... Read more ›
Was this review helpful to you?
Most Recent Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars horrible book
read paris wife and thought i would read this. not at all what i expected. poorly written. filled with anti black anti catholic and anti jewish rants.
Published 2 days ago by joel berkman
1.0 out of 5 stars None
In my opinion this an over rated book for this day and age. It may have been a revelation when published, but is now an old story. It is repetetive and moves slowly.
Published 9 days ago by Critical User
3.0 out of 5 stars Too bland for me
I am putting forth this review at a great risk of literary blasphemy. But then, it is true from my point of view. To me it was quite bland. Read more
Published 10 days ago by saket
5.0 out of 5 stars Classic Hemingway
This is an excellent book. I found it to be a very enjoyable, and thought provoking book. Hemingway was an amazing author.
Published 12 days ago by Traveling Hobo
1.0 out of 5 stars Great story themes, but poorly written
This reads like a rough draft of notes for how the story plot should be organized. There's no emotion felt while reading it because there's no emotion put into it. Read more
Published 12 days ago by Cesar
5.0 out of 5 stars Classic
I just like Hemingway's meaningful simple prose! Great book for all generations to learn about style and life as it was lived in quieter times.
Published 13 days ago by J. R. Jackson
5.0 out of 5 stars Hemingway
The format and style of The Sun Also Rises contrasts greatly with many modern works. Initially, I found the read to be difficult; however, I quickly warmed to the text. Read more
Published 17 days ago by white
1.0 out of 5 stars Boring.....
We are reading this book for our book club and I will probably not finish it because it is so boring. Read more
Published 18 days ago by Vicki Warren Collier
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read--flash from the past
Very worth reading-- it had been YEARS!!! Surprised at the strong anti-Semitism-- I hadn't remembered that about Hemingway. Read more
Published 21 days ago by omakris
5.0 out of 5 stars Lost generations
An amazing work from a so-called "simpler time" which wasn't simple in any way. Lean, hard prose with an edge all the way through.
Published 27 days ago by Kenneth B. Waxlax
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?


Forums

Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions

Topic From this Discussion
Welcome to the Sun Also Rises forum
Hemingway employs the 'Iceberg Theory' of writing in which he believed that he would write only the 'facts', and the important themes are then allowed to shine through on their own. I think the important clue to the heart of the novel, 'The Sun Also Rises', is that (in Hemingway's own words),... Read more
Mar 18, 2013 by valis1949 |  See all 8 posts
rip off pricing
The publishers are certainly gouging the public when they charge over $12 for a kindle edition that costs a few cents to produce and distribute (marginal cost obviously) but it is not Amazon's fault and they should not be blamed. The publishers and Apple got together and agreed to fix prices.... Read more
Nov 9, 2012 by Ian S. Mccarthy |  See all 3 posts
why should or shouldn't we continue reading Why should The Sun Also...
When I was in high school in the sixties I read this book and thought it was great stuff, all these people living abroad, and having affairs, and getting drunk. Now that I am in MY sixties, and living abroad, these people seem kind of stupid, doing nothing worthwhile, getting drunk and being... Read more
Jul 13, 2012 by Ellen R. Snyder |  See all 4 posts
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 






Look for Similar Items by Category