Winner Take Nothing

Written by Ernest Hemingway

Narrated by Stacy Keach

Ernest Hemingway's Winner Take Nothing contains fourteen stories of varying length. Some of them have appeared in magazines but the majority have not been published before. The characters and backgrounds are widely varied. Some stories included are “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” a story about one man’s night in a café; “Homage to Switzerland” concerns various conversations at a Swiss railway-station restaurant; “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio” is laid in the accident ward of a hospital in Western United States; and so on.

Ernest Hemingway made his literary start as a short-story writer. He has always excelled in that medium, and this volume reveals him at his best.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Apr 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9780743578127

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway is regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Some of his best-known works include For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, and A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway passed away in July 1961.

Reviews for Winner Take Nothing

[rbeffa_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm a Hemingway fan, but that doesn't mean I like everything he's done, nor all the topics he chose to write about. Nevertheless there is no denying his power as a writer. This story collection dates to 1933 and includes one of his most famous short works, "A Clean Well-lighted Place" as well as what I consider to be one of his very finest and most memorable short stories, the opener "The Short Happy Life of Frances Macomber."In all there are 17 short stories in this collection and several to me were very minor things which keeps me from rating this book higher. Anyone who is interested in Hemingway should read this however for the better stories and to see his breadth as a writer. There is some powerful stuff in here.

[jaylehnertz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Winner Take Nothing was Hemingway’s third major collection of short stories, published in 1933 between his two non-fiction works, Death in the Afternoon and The Green Hills of Africa. By the 1930s, Hemingway had lost much of his luster with the literary critics. With the publication of this third collection, many of the more prestigious of the critics began to characterize some of his writing as tedious, repetitious and uninteresting. Hemingway, now universally recognized as the master of the short story, may have included in this volume several not so memorable pieces but overall the stories continue to challenge and inform.

Death and/or aging are major themes: “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”; “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen”; “A Natural History of the Dead” reprinted from Death in the Afternoon; “A Day’s Wait”; “Fathers and Sons”. Three deal with Nick Adams: “The Light of the World” places Nick in Michigan as a curious teenager; “A Way You’ll Never Be” sees Nick in Italy after he has been wounded; “Fathers and Sons” encounters Nick as an adult remembering his Father. Love or rather marginalized love runs through several: “The Sea Change”; “The Mother of the Queen”; “One Reader Writes”. Nor does Hemingway ignore the have-nots, the unfortunate, the lonely: “After the Storm”; “Homage to Switzerland”; Wines of Wyoming”; “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio”.

As is so typical of his earlier work, the writing is sparse and suggestive, showing an amazing facility with dialogue. And there are always within the stories links to his own life—to the people, places and incidents that forged his own private and public worlds. Although the stories stand alone, knowing something of Hemingway’s biography adds other dimensions to his fiction.