Selected Short Stories of Weldon Kees

The short stories in this collection, predominantly set in Depression-era mid-America, tend to feature bleak, realistic settings and characters resigned to their meagre lives. Despite the dark overtones, these stories are not without grim humor. The owner of an auto parts store occasionally "sells," to interested patrons, his sister Betty Lou; a young woman taking tickets at the Roseland Gardens futilely dreams of escape from the future she sees for herself; cryptic messages in library books indicate the yearnings of a silenced patron; an old man carefully saves his money to fulfill the requirements of a chain letter only to be disappointed by a spiteful daughter-in-law; and a young man helplessly watches the disintegration of a once prominent family. The stories are keenly observant, darkly humorous, and absurdly fatalistic.In this new edition, Dana Gioia has added three stories to the fourteen gathered in the first edition.

Dana Gioia is a poet, literary critic, and a cultural commentator for the BBC. He is the author of Interrogations at Noon and Can Poetry Matter?