Among Benét's most beautiful and moving works are these eight deceptively simple short stories that he assembled as Tales of Our Time. Each tale uses a seemingly commonplace situation-a class reunion, a funeral, teenagers falling in love in the summer, a family embarrassed by a father's crude joke, a marriage quietly failing under cover of social courtesies-to expose the fraught and complex dimensions of the characters' relationship to society and themselves.

The picture of America that these stories paint is full of wit and humor, but also sorrow and tragic awareness. They are a reminder to today's reader of how much of our "modern" experience is really universal, and how even those people and societies most changed by the course of progress remain at heart the same people, for better and worse.