Somewhat dated, but an easy read. The problem I am having in rereading Vonnegut's earlier work, is that his critiques of what was once seen as a utopian future are spot on, but his idea that the future would be populated by a prosperous middle class, is suddenly become obsolete. In fact the middl...
A great collection of graduate speeches that are sharp, witty and full of sarcastic knowledge for the young. A good reminder for those of us who are a bit older to remember what is important in life. A message to stop and notice "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is." To not focus on the l...
I only scanned other reviews of this short story, but it looks like many did what I did, which was read this close behind "2BR02B." This comes across like a prequel to that, at least in terms of setting (during the overpopulation that has been resolved by "2BR02B"). Otherwise the characters are d...
"The Big Trip Up Yonder" is yet another short genre exercise by Vonnegut that covers the same familiar turf of fun-with-an-edge-of-terror view of the near future as his other short stories, "2BR02B" and "Harrison Bergeron." This story, however, lacks the dark twist of "2BR02B" or dystopian vibe ...
Somewhere between Utopian and Dystopian, Vonnegut imagines a future which is both good news and bad news. Its always a treat to read Vonnegut and the short story form is perfect for such a concise mind as his to showcase his wit and talent for fiction. He doesn't pose the question - astonishingly...
I think this book makes a nice addition for any fan. Readers often don't get to see an author's early works, and just like the unfinished works, there's kind of a reason for that :-D The most valuable part of the book is the touching introduction by Vonnegut's daughter. The first part of the book...
some excellent short stories, quite reminiscent of Roald Dahl's. they're all extremely quick and easy reads, but in just a few pages he manages to cram all his usual humour, poignancy and hopeful cynicism. some plots are far-fetched, others anodyne; some characters are unremarkable, others lar...
An interesting collection of short stories from Kurt Vonnegut in his early days. At times the stories are a little moralistic and heavy-handed but this is likely the result of the fact that they were originally intended for publication in magazines, and who doesn't like a good moral there? Vonneg...
Great collection of short stories by Vonnegut. Imaginative, moral and fun. None of the stories are capturing. They are all rather forseeable and nothing special
Vonnegut does a wonderful job with a short story and while most stories were "okay" to "yeah, I liked it I guess", it's definitely worth it for the few 4 to 5 star ratings."Where I Live" (Venture- Traveler’s World, October 1964) - 2/5 Kinda boring and no real plot. Just meandering"Harrison Berger...
Hocus Pocus is the story of Eugene Debs Hartke, a Vietnam veteran, who after leaving the Army became a teacher at a private school and then a prison. After a prison break, he is mistaken for one of the ring leaders and ends up awaiting trial, dying of TB, contemplating his life and trying to coun...
Future civilizations - better civilizations than this one - are going to judge all men by the extent to which they've been artists. You and I, if some future archeologist finds our works miraculously preserved in some city dump, will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing else about u...
Rewritten after rereading in July 2012.This darkly humorous satire starts with a world financial crisis in 1986 (hopefully that’s where the similarity with current times ends), leading to WW3 – though it’s not really about either: it’s fundamentally about adaptation. A million years in the future...
At this point I've gotten fairly familiar with Kurt Vonnegut's tone and flavor. The sense of universalism and equality consistently sound as often as his humor and irony rings.This books reads as a perversion of all four themes. To me.Usually Vonnegut's works seem to read with some underlying se...
It’s been almost thirty years since I read Player Piano, and all I had retained from that first read was the name of the main character, a faint recollection of the novel’s focus on a future world heavily reliant on automation, and a vague sense of not liking the book all that much despite Vonneg...
I read Vonnegut now. Vonnegut is cool.I have vague memories of reading Vonnegut before—I have some very old, very pulp editions of some of his other novels that I … er … “liberated” from my father. I swear I’ve read Breakfast of Champions before, and I’m pretty sure I read either Cat’s Cradle or ...
میدونید چیه؟ الان اولین سوالی که میخوام تو این ریویو بپرسم اینه که اون کسی که اینو به من دادی!آیا هدف خاصی داشتید از دادنش؟ یعنی میخوام بگم چی باعث شد"اینو"بدین؟ چون چندوقت پیش، از یه نفر دیگه که یه کتاب داده بود بهم که جدی جدی جدی دوسش داشتم و احساس میکردم از اون نوع کتاباییه که واقعا خیلی "لیلی...
Céline completed this final instalment in his trilogy a day before his death . . . so much for that happy retirement . . . this book (and apparently all of his novels) have a fragmented nouveau roman approach: breaking the text into unpunctuated sentences connected via ellipses . . . like this . ...
The Eden Express was written by Kurt Vonnegut's son Mark, and is a memoir of his struggles with schizophrenia, or his struggles with, what he once called, "apocalypse, shit storms, and eternal truths."The first 70 pages of this 214 page book were pretty slow, and barely interesting. They mainly ...
'Help me, God, God help me. I hate your ass, but help me if you can. Help me lie down beside the still waters.' (P. 236)This book is one of the most compulsive reads I've experienced. It's 'literary' in its themes and form, but it crackles along easy as pie. I'm a very slow reader normally, b...
I'm on the fence about a lot of Vonnegut's work. Because on the one hand, I read Slaughterhouse 5 as a literature illiterate in Junior year of High School (it wasn't until after High School that I became a real fan of reading). So there's a lot to love about Vonnegut on a purely nostalgic basis, ...
Some of the best sci-fi you'll ever find is golden age short stories. Sturgeon knows how to write; he coined the phrase "90% of everything is crud." If that's not enough, here's a paragraph from the first story in the collection:"It was beautiful. It was golden, with a dusty finish like that o...
One of the main themes of Vonnegut’s career, and of these essays, is that families, and from them our own personal psyches, have been devolved by modern life. The best we can do with its “rootlessness, mobility, and impossibly tough-minded loneliness” (35) is synthetic families, such as AA, the m...
Down and Out in ChicagoIn the euphoria of post-World-War-II America, it was probably hard to think much about the difficulties of the American underclass. The socialist realism of the Thirties, with its clear depiction of the reality of the poor or immigrant classes, had been swept aside; now soc...
Although this book was compiled in 1999, it contains the author’s early short stories, published in magazines in the 1950s and ’60s. It was not an easy or a fast book to read but it was powerful and it made an impression. I won’t re-read it; it didn’t give me much pleasure, which is why 4 stars i...
Al parecer, Madre Noche es la única novela de Kurt Vonnegut sin ningún componente de ciencia ficción, algo que importa bastante poco porque el resultado es magnífico. Las tramas que se van presentando están perfectamente hilvanadas y mediante un buen forro de flashbacks, entretejidos cada pocos c...
"Matadero Cinco" catapultó a Kurt Vonnegut como uno de los grandes ídolos de la juventud norteamericana y se convirtió de inmediato en un clásico de la literatura contemporánea. Una historia amarga, conmovedora y a la vez divertidísima, de la inocencia confrontada con el apocalipsis, «una novela ...
La cartera del cretino. Disponible para los lectores por primera vez, la cartera del cretino es una colección de siete piezas nunca antes publicadas de Kurt Vonnegut, uno de los más grandes escritores del siglo XX. Sardónicos e inquietantes, estos seis relatos de ficción, y un pequeño ensayo, son...
said the General. “Far more effective against concrete bunkers than aerial bombardment. I remember just before the Bulge, the glamour boys dropped everything they had on a Jerry pillbox, and didn’t even chip it. So I called back to First Army Headquarters. ‘Send up some 240s,’ I said. Well sir…” ...
Now he had found out about that. He had come first to my room in Adams House, where he was told that I was most likely at The Progressive. He had gone to The Progressive and had ascertained what sort of publication it was and that I was its coeditor. Now he was outside the door with a copy folded...
The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don’t see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millepedes—”with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs...
We passed through scenes of hideous want. We climbed the slope of Mount McCabe. The air grew cooler. There was mist. Frank’s house had once been the home of Nestor Aamons, father of Mona, architect of the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle. Aamons had designed it. It straddled a waterfall; had...
Robert Redfield. The idea that all societies evolved through similar, predictable stages on their way to higher (Victorian) civilization, from polytheism to monotheism, for instance, or from the tom-tom to the symphony orchestra, had by then been ridiculed into obscurity. It was generally agreed ...
I. “In many ways, Haley, this is the nicest room in the house, even though it is little and has only one window,” said Annie Cooley, a woman in her middle twenties. She sat on the edge of the cot, her heavy legs crossed, and watched her sixteen-year-old cousin unpack his s...
BARRY and his mother were left off by the helicopter on a rooftop at Barrytron. Mr. Barry maintained the hoax that Felix and I were his employees, and he instructed the pilot sternly that he was to take us wherever we wanted to go, and to stand by until we were through with him. We had all been s...
69, 1977, appears here with the permission of The Viking Press, which gets out collections of Paris Review interviews and owns the copyrights to all of them. Sentences spoken by writers, unless they have been written out first, rarely say what writers wish to say. Writers are unlucky speakers, by...
He was riding home on a bus from his job as a linoleum salesman in a department store. The day marked the end of his seventh year of marriage to Madelaine, who had the car, and who, in fact, owned it. He carried red roses in a long green box under his arm. The bus was crowded, but no women were s...
Hanged by Robert the Horrible, a friend of William the Conqueror, they boxed the compass with fishy eyes. North, east, south, west, and north again, there was no hope for the kind, the poor, and the thoughtful. Across the road from the gibbet lived Elmer the woodcutter, his wife Ivy, and Ethelber...
A thunderstorm boomed and slashed outside. The brother myrmecologists sat facing each other on their bunks, passing their amazing fossil back and forth and speculating as to what Borgorov would bring from the storage shed in the morning. Peter probed his mattress with his ...