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.