The Hemingway Review

Ernest Hemingway's 1933 short story collection Winner Take Nothing is out of print in the United States. The only new copy now available from online booksellers comes from Arrow, a British imprint of the multinational Random House conglomerate; otherwise, American readers can access the collection only in the Finca Vigía edition of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. That implicit verdict alone suggests that history has not been kind to this book. Add to that the collection's problematic and often disturbing themes—including suicidal depression, prostitution, penis amputation, homosexuality, mental illness, sexually transmitted disease, and human decomposition—and it is perhaps understandable why so many of the stories in this collection would qualify as neglected.

Co-editors Mark Cirino and Susan Vandagriff work to remedy that neglect in Reading Hemingway's Winner Take Nothing, the seventh volume in Kent State University Press's "Reading Hemingway" series founded by the late Robert W. Lewis and now edited by Cirino. In their brief introduction, Cirino and Vandagriff describe the disappointing critical reception of Winner Take Nothing and chronicle Hemingway's resulting frustration as expressed in increasingly disgruntled comments in his letters to Maxwell Perkins, his long-suffering editor at Scribner's. As Cirino and Vandagriff concede, "Winner Take Nothing is a collection of short stories about loners and losers and misfits and ne'er-do-wells. … The grotesqueries of these fourteen stories are outcasts in Hemingway's corpus and have been virtually from the beginning" (xi).

As the panelists in the session about this book at the 2022 Hemingway Society Conference in Sheridan, Wyoming, acknowledged, many of the stories in [End Page 107] this collection were originally published in Scribner's magazine, although they are not traditional Scribner's fare. With their sometimes deliberately offensive content, they would have been more suitable for the little magazines of modernism, with those venues' limited print runs and sophisticated audiences, but the Great Depression had killed off most of those publications by the time Hemingway was publishing these stories.

Unlike previous books in this series, which were written by a single author, Reading Hemingway's Winner Take Nothing includes fifteen chapters—one, written by Vandagriff, that discusses the collection's title, introduction, and epigraph, and one for each story—written by fourteen different authors. Despite the different authors, however, each chapter follows a consistent organizational pattern—an introduction of the story followed by line readings that discuss significant themes, outline points of contention, and explicate obscure passages in accessible terms. As a result, the book seems more unified than it otherwise might.

Cirino and Vandagriff's pairings of scholars and short stories are often inspired: Carl Eby, who has published extensively on psychosexuality in Hemingway's fiction, explains "The Sea Change," for example, and Ryan Hediger, best known for his work on animality in Hemingway's writings, examines "A Natural History of the Dead." Like Hemingway's audience, the collection is resolutely international in its scope: Boris Vejdovsky, who teaches at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, tackles the obscure "Homage to Switzerland," and Alberto Lena, who lives and works in Spain, writes on the Spanish café culture of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."

The fact that several of the authors champion the story they were assigned testifies to the editors' apt assignment process. Kirk Curnutt, author of Reading Hemingway's To Have and Have Not in this series, offers a vigorous defense of "After the Storm," contending that the story "plays a pivotal, catalytic role in the direction that Hemingway's writing took in the mid-1930s" (11). "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen," Suzanne del Gizzo tells us, "has a stylistic and linguistic complexity that few critics have appreciated" (72), and Cirino pronounces "A Way You'll Never Be" "the most harrowing depiction of shellshock Hemingway ever wrote" (99). Finally, Vandagriff persuasively argues that "'Wine of Wyoming' is not as simple as it appears. … Despite its...