Kesey’s short story “Wait”—included in this debut collection, as well as in the 2007 edition of Best American Short Stories—begins and ends in an airport lounge. Travelers from around the globe wait for a fog to lift so they can board their flights. The fog teases, but never releases its hold on the terminal, and as the tension builds, the passengers go through the various phases of civilization: congregation, organization, dissolution and finally a separation into factions. It ends with a balloon ride.

In “Wait,” we encounter everything that could be considered quintessentially Keseyian: a global perspective, unnamed characters impersonally identified, an increasing absurdity that runs alongside the story’s growing emotional complexity, a knockout sense of humor and a missing presence that silently shoves the story to its finale. It’s the latter that makes Kesey most obviously a near-direct descendant of Samuel Beckett. In “Wait,” the plane never arrives. In “Interview,” the answers are present but the questions absent. Even in the collection’s most emotionally rich tale, “Invunche y Voladora,” it’s a newlywed couple’s expectations—for a relaxing honeymoon, for a blissful early marriage—that never quite manifest.

We imagine there will be more than a few who scratch their heads at stories like “Hat,” wherein an unidentified “they” force a man to build a fully functioning airplane out of a paper clip; the man shows up his taskmasters by forging a submarine out of a thumb tack. But Kesey clearly toys with the short-story form, and it’s exciting to watch him play.