Reading Hemingway's Winner Take Nothing

Mark Cirino, Susan Vandagriff

"Written in 1933 and one of Hemingway's lesser-known books, Winner Take Nothing was his third and final collection of short stories. These stories are about loners and losers and misfits and ne'er-do-wells. Its characters are ill, tortured, maligned, and frustrated by Hemingway's world. Like the characters it depicts, Winner Take Nothing is likewise a misfit in Hemingway's career, a volume of short stories that, as of this writing, is not even in print. Its more popular predecessors, In Our Time (1925) and Men without Women (1927), are held up as iconic collections in the American short story tradition. The grotesqueries of these 14 stories are outcasts in Hemingway's corpus and have been neglected virtually from the beginning. Editors Mark Cirino and Susan Vandagriff recover an underrated work that still reflects contemporary concerns. Through line-by-line annotations and...