The young W. D. Wetherell spent his school vacations reading. He found that the authors who meant the most to him were Herman Melville and Henry David Thoreau, not J. D. Salinger; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust, not John Updike. These were his contemporaries in spirit and style, if not in time. Their works have affinities with Wetherell's writing, which Rick Bass has characterized as "an uncommon mix of orthodoxical storytelling."

Wetherell's best short stories are unflinching and compassionate accounts of ordinary people faced with bewildering incongruities that test the human heart. His themes include disconnection, desire, and remembrance. His settings include countryside, lakes, suburban tract houses, and ballparks. The characters in Wetherell's stories, many of whom are disillusioned and even broken, embody the particularly American conviction that everything matters-that with courage, people can do better...