Meet Jake Barnes: working journalist, expatriate, tough talker, tragic hero. Jake was horribly wounded in the war—in fact, he was effectively gelded—so he spends his time in Paris getting drunk in cafes, nursing his ennui, bantering with his hard-boiled friends, and mooning over his unconsummatable love for a beautiful, aristocratic Englishwoman named Bret Ashley who dines on men three meals a day. This doomed pair, plus a lively cast of romantically reckless expatriates, head to Pamplona for the annual fiesta, where they drink vast amounts of wine, hook up, betray one another, and try to forget the caverns of loss and emptiness that gape inside them. The Sun Also Rises popularized the idea of the "Lost Generation"—but the anomie and disappointment at its heart seem to come around for every generation, sooner or later.—L.G.