The Fifth Column part of the book is very entertaining. I enjoyed it more than the four stories. Give this book a chance if you have any interest in either the Spanish Civil War or Ernest Hemingway. Also try A SUN ALSO RISES. That book is good as well.

i think this book is a good book with with many underling meanings as to what hemingway was trying to say to his readers.

he wrote this book as a story and then added his hidden meanings

Hemingway's short stories have always been hit & miss with me. Some of them don't really do anything for me, none are among my very favorite short stories, but most of them are well-written and thought provoking. Such is the case with this set.

Hemingway offers us an assortment of masculine characters, mostly picked from his favorite types of male personas: soldiers, bullfighters, mobsters and prizefighters. Despite the title of the book, there are a smattering of female characters in some of the tales. They rank with the standard fare of impetuous women that Hemingway likes to write about.

The scope of the stories is quite broad, featuring painful topics such as abortion, breakup, heartbreak and being past ones prime. The latter theme is taken up in THE UNDEFEATED, THE KILLERS and FIFTY GRAND and later on re-appears in Hemingway's THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. FIFTY GRAND, which details the demise of a washed-up boxer, is my favorite short story in this collection.

Stories such as IN ANOTHER COUNTRY, and NOW I LAY ME introduce motifs that are echoed in A FAREWELL TO ARMS, which was published just a few years after MWW.

Tho I've never been enamoured with the short story genre, Hemingway does rank as one of the best in the business - particularly in the American literary canon. Hence, followers of Hemingway as well as people who greatly enjoy short stories would likely appreciate this book.

"Men Without Women" by Ernest Hemingway features a glimpse into the genius that is Hemingway. I found it to be a great read during a summer weekend. I especially enjoyed the Nick Adams stories and the story about the matador fighting one last glorious bullfight (one of Hemingway's favoright subjects). "Men Without Women" deals with subjects both everyday and serious such as love and abortion. This short read by Hemingway makes a great introduction for anyone wanting to begin reading Hemingway. I highly recomend it.

These are some the best stories I have ever read. When I was in high school, my class was asked to read In Another Country for discussion. It was my first Hemingway short story, and an introduction to the novels we would be reading. I almost cried. His writing is just so gut-wrenchingly honest and raw. No overwrought explanations of emotion. You know how these characters are feeling simply because of how the speak and act. Hemingway is the master of context. The Killers is almost like a mystery story that never gets solved. Why doesn't he run out of town? What's going to happen to the big guy? I love this stuff and can't get enough of it.

Perhaps I was distracted when I heard these short stories, but they seemed to lack substance. The characters seemed like passing shadows - I never knew them well enough to have any solid emotional attachment. The stories were all very short, and most felt incomplete. If you are just starting with Hemingway, try something else first. If you like his style, I'm sure you'll love this collection.

Ernest Hemingway, Winner Take Nothing (Scribner's, 1933)

Arguably Hemingway's finest book of short stories, Winner Take Nothing contains fourteen relatively short and always spare looks at various stages of life. What seem, upon first reading, to be nothing more than frameworks or outlines take on more meat upon reflection. Hemingway lets the reader fill in the small details, guiding his imagination rather than manipulating it. This does mean that the onus is on the reader more than usual with this book; Hemingway's work is meant to be thought-provoking rather than escapist. If you can make it to the end of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," the second story in the book, and reflect on it without feeling anything, then the book's probably not for you. Those who approach it with the proper mindset, however, will find it to be full of opportunities to plumb one's own imagination. ****

This was the first Hemingway book I have read and I was surprised. I always imagined his books were boring and completely symbolibic to the point that you don't understand it. However I enjoyed this book and all the short stories involved in this. All the stories were interesting and connected the theme that the "winner takes nothing" in different situations. I enjoyed the fact that since he probably wrote this in Europe, Hemingway weaved French and sometimes German into the dialogue. Also in one story Fitzgerald is mentioned as a wild child. "Winner take nothing" is an easy book to understand and follow, and the stories are original.

I'm not an expert on Hemingway and I haven't read more than just a couple of his books, but I thought this was a short, interesting book by one of Hemingway's sons, Gregory. He's not a writer and doesn't seem neither to try to become one nor to emulate his father's talents (although he tells us that he did try just both, when he was young). Instead, he gives more than a couple of interesting anecdotes. He puts some light on Hemingway's obsessions with his image and macho figure. At the time I read this book, a probably silly association came to my mind: Walt Whitman (another American hero from another age) and his supposed homosexuality -a complex statement that I, basicaly, disagree with. There're some aspects in Hemingway's postures in this book that made me think about his own unassumed conflicts with homosexual feelings and his image as a boxer and a 'viril' writer. Excellent pictures in the hard cover edition I've read.

Although you can get twice as many stories in the new complete edition, this small paperback is perfect for people who don't want to commit to a hard-cover, or to 300+ pages of a Hemingway novel, or to long chapters. The few 4+ page short stories I read in this collection let me glimpse Hemingway's genius and still have more and want more. There is a nice, short preface to these stories written by EH.

Sandison is capitalizing on the rush for books on the 100th anniversary of Hemingway's birth. If you know nothing about Hemingway, the book is valuable, but Sandison's account of the life is a mechanical recitation of facts gleaned from the Lynn and Mellow biographies. Many of the well-reproduced photos lose their effect because of a faux sepia tone or a blue tint. The prose is often turgid, suggesting that Sandison would do well to reread and imitate Hemingway. Authorial or editorial errors abound. To cite from pages 77-80 only, Bumby's nanny is spelled "Rorbach" and "Rohrbach," the Fitzgeralds' daughter is "Scoltie," and "pseudonymous"--difficult enough to pronounce--gets orthographically spanked as "pseudonomymous." The book is good for bedtime reading, but it is not scholarly by a long stretch.

The essays in this book will show you everything wrong with modern Hemingway scholarship. Critics today seem to be in a love-hate relationship with Hemingway; they pay lip-service to his greatest works, yet disparage him at every opportunity. This in a volume of essays ostensibly dedicated to a great writer. I would prefer insightful essays that try to help the reader understand Hemingway, not the didactic ones that say "This aspect of Hemingway is bad." Scott Donaldson's introductory essay "Hemingway and Fame," is good, yet blemished by his snobbery toward "popular" writers. If writers like Hemingway or Mark Twain are still popular and widely read by general readers, Donaldson says that they "have been admitted to the canon despite the off-putting aroma of publicity that surrounds them." A more charitable observer would say that the popularity that still surrounds them is a testimony to the universal chords they both strike, and if those writers still succeed in reaching out to readers decades after their deaths, then it signifies their power.

Perhaps the best essay is Robert Fleming's "Hemingway's Late Fiction: Breaking New Ground." Fleming discusses Hemingway's much maligned post-war fiction and convincingly argues that even in his old age Hemingway still had vitality and was exploring new territory, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but to call that period a literary failure is superficial and unjust. "Hemingway never stopped attempting to grow," Fleming concludes.

Kenneth Kinnamon's essay "Hemingway and Politics" attempts to prove that "Hemingway was always on the left," contrary to the general belief that Hemingway, if anything, was right-wing. Kinnamon fails. He makes a big deal of the fact that the only man Hemingway ever voted for for President was Socialist Eugene Debs in 1920. Yet the only explanation Hemingway ever gave for his vote was that Debs "was an honest man and in jail," which suggests to the undogmatic reader that the individualist Hemingway saw Debs not as a leftist but as a man of integrity. He voted for Debs's willingness to suffer for his beliefs, not his beliefs, in other words. Kinnamon plays up Hemingway's participation in the Spanish Civil War on the Republic's side, although by Hemingway's own account this was motivated by his antifascist and pro-republican sympathies, not communist. "This was not a Stalinist experience," Hemingway wrote. "These were episodes in defence of the Spanish Republic." To Kinnamon's credit, he quotes Hemingway's frequent nose-thumbing, disparagement, and dismissals of the left, but he doesn't brush them off very well. In fact, a reading of his essay leads the reader to a different conclusion than the one Kinnamon makes.

There are several "gender-orientated" essays in here. All are pretty uninsightful. Hopefully when these critics grow up and mature Hemingway will get some insightful treatment that he is usually lacking in this day and age.