By the age of thirty, Weldon Kees (1914–55) was a poet, journalist, musician, painter, photographer, and short story writer living in New York City. Despite a contract for a forthcoming novel, however, he stopped writing fiction, moved to San Francisco, and worked as an artist and filmmaker. On July 18, 1955, his car was found on the Golden Gate Bridge, and he has not been seen since.

These stories by Kees, predominantly set in Depression-era mid-America, feature bleak, realistic settings and characters resigned to their meager lives. The owner of an auto parts store occasionally "sells" his sister Betty Lou to interested patrons; a cryptic message in library books indicates the yearnings of a silenced patron; a young woman taking tickets at the Roseland Gardens futilely dreams of escape from the future she sees for herself; and 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. Many of these stories are set in the Nebraska of Kees's youth, and they are written from a Midwestern sensibility: keenly observant, darkly humorous, and absurdly fantastic.

In this new edition, Dana Gioia has added three stories to the fourteen gathered in the first edition, The Ceremony and Other Stories. The New York Times named that first edition, published in 1984, a notable book of the year.

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?

"The tragedy of Kees's vanishing is that one of the most distinctive and important voices in twentieth-century American literature all but vanished with him. This reissue of his short stories presents an invaluable chance to have it back again. . . . In story after story, Kees sounds like no other author. Writing in a style remarkably different from that of his witty reviews and his complex, satiric poetry, Kees employed a deliberately flat, smooth language for his stories; this lends them intensity, and a precise focus on the tension accompanying even the most banal day-to-day existence. Grounded in the Middle American 1930s he knew so well, Kees's stories remain relevant today for the bleakness they evoke, owing to the single-mindedness of his vision and to the almost claustrophobic but always achingly true detail with which he renders ordinary people. Decades after they were first published, these stories are still about us; they still surprise by showing us our own true, and frequently saddest, selves. . . . Now, with the publication of the Selected Short Stories, the time has come to give Weldon Kees the respect he's long been due—to give him our compliments, wherever he is."—Kathy Rooney, The Nation

"It appears American literature lost a distinctive voice."—Evan S. Connell, New York Times Book Review