Inner Take Nothing

Winner Take Nothing

Fourteen of some of Hemingway’s finest short stories that examine life’s different stages through Hemingway’s unique perspective. 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.

The Hemingway Short Story

Ernest Hemingway revolutionized the American short story, establishing himself as a master of realist fiction in the tradition of Guy de Mauppasant. Yet none of Hemingway's emulators has succeeded in duplicating his understated, minimalist style. In his Iceberg Theory of fiction, only the tip of the story is seen on the surface--the rest is submerged out of sight. This study surveys the scope of Hemingway's mastery of the short story form, enabling a fuller understanding of such works as "Indian Camp," "Big Two-Hearted River," "The Killers," "The Mother of a Queen," "In Another Country," "Hills Like White Elephants," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and "The Mercenaries," among many others. All 13 stories from his underrated Winner Take Nothing collection are evaluated in detail.

Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine