Foreword by Dave Eggers Smart, whimsical, and often scathing, the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut influenced a generation of American writers—including Dave Eggers, author of this volume's Foreword. In these previously unpublished gems, Vonnegut's originality infuses a unique landscape of factories, trailers, and bars—and characters who pit their dreams and fears against a cruel and sometimes comically indifferent world. Here are stories of men and machines, art and artifice, and how ideals of fortune, fame, and love take curious twists in ordinary lives. An ambitious builder of roads, commanding an army of bulldozers, graders, and asphalt spreaders, fritters away his free time with miniature trains—until the women in his life crash his fantasy land. Trapped in a stenography pool, a young dreamer receives a call from a robber on the run, who presents her with a strange proposition. A crusty newspaperman is forced onto a committee to judge Christmas displays—a job that leads him to a suspiciously ostentatious ex-con and then a miracle. A hog farmer's widow receives cryptic, unsolicited letters from a man in Schenectady about "the indefinable sweet aches of the spirit." But what will she find when she goes to meet him in the flesh? These beautifully rendered works are a testament to Vonnegut's unique blend of observation and imagination. Like a present left behind by a departed loved one, While Mortals Sleep bestows upon us a shimmering Kurt Vonnegut gift: a poignant reflection of our world as it is and as it could be.
"Look at the Birdie" evokes a world in which squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town Lotharios struggle to adapt to ... Show synopsis "Look at the Birdie" evokes a world in which squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town Lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. In "Confido", a family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. In "Ed Luby''s Key Club", a man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. In "Look at the Birdie", a quack psychiatrist turned ''murder counsellor'' concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. The stories are cautionary they also brim with his trademark humour. Wry, ironic, satirical and poignant "Look at the Birdie" reflects the anxieties of the postwar era in which they were written and provides an insight into the development of Vonnegut''s early style.
Deadeye Dick is Kurt Vonnegut''s funny, chillingly satirical look at the death of innocence. Amid a true Vonnegutian host of horrors--a double murder, a fatal dose of radioactivity, a decapitation, an annihilation of a city by a neutron bomb--Rudy Waltz, aka Deadeye Dick, takes us along on a zany search for absolution and happiness. Here is a tale of crime and punishment that makes us rethink what we believe . . . and who we say we are.
From the now-silent typewriter of the mordant humorist, an uneven posthumous collection of fiction and nonfiction once again plumbing the madness and soul-destroying inhumanities of war.
As a young man and a prisoner of war, Kurt Vonnegut witnessed the 1945 US fire-bombing of Dresden in Germany, which reduced the once proudly beautiful city to rubble and claimed the lives of thousands of its citizens. For many years, Kurt tried to write about Dresden but the words would not come. When he did write about it, he combined his trademark humour, unfettered imagination, boundless humanity and keen sense of irony to create one of the most powerful anti-war books every written, and an enduring American classic. This special edition is published with notes of appreciation from some of the book's ardent fans (Kate Atkinson, Richard Herring, Robin Ince) as well as fascinating extra material from Vonnegut's archive which casts light on the genesis, reception and enduring influence of an iconic American classic.
A companion novel to "Slaughterhouse 5", covering similar themes and drawing on the author's experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden. A black satire, it tells of an American spy in Germany who becomes confused by his own methods as he sends his coded messages by using pro-Nazi radio broadcasts.
A novel about people, their pleasures, pains and perversions, and money. It is a satire on insanity - a millionaire's private lunacy, the inherited obsessions of a famous family and the collective madness that grips a whole nation. The author's other novels include "Slaughterhouse 5".
