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by: Weldon Kees
List Price: $12.00Amazon.com's Price: $10.20 You Save: $1.80 (15%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780803278066
ISBN: 0803278063
Label: Bison Books
Manufacturer: Bison Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 172
Publication Date: October 01, 2002
Publisher: Bison Books
Sales Rank: 937808
Studio: Bison Books
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Product Description:
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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Live Gloriously In A Suicide's Brain (from Ahadada Books)
In a former incarnation, I lived together with a now-ex wife in a beautiful apartment that had been the home of my ex-wife's grandparents. I loved this place, because the decor, the coral base-lit floor lamps, the art deco radio, the wallpaper was 1940's and '50's vintage and some pieces quite possibly dated from a decade or two before. This is the America that the grown Weldon Kees inhabited, and the smells, the arabesques on the carpeting, the tinny sounds of the radio are all replicated to perfection ... Read More
Rating: - A Forgotten US Enigma
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No one knows how, or when, or even whether, Weldon Kees died. Having talked both of fleeing to Mexico and of suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge, his car was found near the latter on July 18, 1955. No hint of the man has since emerged.
But while he was active, Kees wrote fiction (initially), poetry, and cultural criticism of all kinds for major national periodicals; he painted (abstract expressionism), was a jazz musician, made films, and collaborated with anthropologists and behavioural ... Read More
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