More accurate arithmetic: Put two losers together and you get a smaller loser with bigger debt.
In a short story, a small-time loser gets to lose.
In Keith Dixon's novel "The Art of Losing," the narrator, Michael Jacobs, starts out as a small-time loser.
Then once Jackie Autry began operating the team for her aging husband, she performed the remarkable trick of turning a large-market team into a small-market loser.
A self-proclaimed "storyteller... to anyone who will listen," he mumbles his literary musings into a hand-held voice recorder, betraying the ache of a small-town loser trapped in a world from which he yearns to escape.
He would be the plucky small-town loser who had flown the flag for weekend sailors everywhere taking on the world's most gruelling endurance test and making it home to his loved ones..
Brilliantly translated from Slovak by Peter Petro, this story of a small-town loser turned enterprising bravura gangster in post-communist Slovakia is fuelled with formidable energy and ice-cool satire.
In a mock-preacher voice each night, he offered the audience paradise in this life through "the ministry of rock-and-roll". An early convert, he was quite literally saved by the music when the guitar gave meaning and direction to the life of an awkward small-town loser ostracized by his parents, his peers and the nuns who taught at his school.
Although his ex-wives and sister all rhapsodize about his extraordinary charm, although his jealous brother, too, speaks of him as a larger-than-life figure, Mr. Leithauser shows us only a small-time loser, practiced in the arts of duplicity and self-deception.
Winners: Facebook, American Express, small businesses Losers: Groupon, LivingSocial, Google, foursquare, VISA, MasterCard.
