The Personals. Brian O’Connell

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Introduction

      The story goes that Ernest Hemingway and a few of his literary pals were knocking about the Algonquin Hotel in New York one night in the 1920s, before they had the joys of social media to help them avoid conversation, and they began challenging each other to write a novel using just six words. Cutting a long story short, Hemingway is said to have won hands down with the words: ‘For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.’

He’s reputed to have said that those six words were the best he ever wrote. They are loaded with life experience, love, loss, death and hope perhaps; a six-word portal into lived experience that Dorothy Parker or William