This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Two skiers come down from a month in the high snow into a village in the Austrian Tyrol, tired of the mountain and hungry for ordinary things: a bed, a table, beer before noon.
At the inn they find the sexton drinking with the innkeeper, and a peasant from the valley who has just buried his wife. She died in December, and the ground was frozen, so he kept her in the woodshed until the thaw. The innkeeper tells the rest of it in a few sentences, as a local curiosity, and then lunch arrives and the two skiers order another bottle.
First published in 1927, An Alpine Idyll is one of the Nick Adams stories and one of Ernest Hemingway’s bleakest: a tale of mountain cold, casual horror and the strange flatness of hearing something unbearable in a warm room.
Listen to the complete, unabridged audiobook of this classic American short story.
