Canary In A Cat House

Vonnegut's first collection of short stories, includes 12 wickedly funny stories told as only Vonnegut can.

Vonnegut in Fact offers a thorough assessment of the artistry of Kurt Vonnegut, known not only as the best-selling author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Timequake, and a dozen other novels, but also as the most widely recognized public spokesperson among writers since Mark Twain. Jerome Klinkowitz traces the emergence of Vonnegut's nonfiction since the 1960s, when commentary and feature journalism replaced the rapidly dying short story market. Offering close readings and insightful criticism of Vonnegut's three major works of nonfiction, his many uncollected pieces, and his unique manner of public speaking, Klinkowitz explains how Vonnegut's personal visions developed into a style of great public responsibility that mirrored the growth of his fiction. Klinkowitz views his subject as a gentle manipulator of popular forms and an extremely personable figure; what might seem radically innovative and even iconoclastic in his fiction becomes comfortably avuncular and familiarly American when followed to its roots in his public spokesmanship.

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the few American writers since Mark Twain to have won and sustained a great popular acceptance while boldly introducing new themes and forms on the literary cutting edge. This is the "Vonnegut effect" that Jerome Klinkowitz finds unique among postmodernist authors. In this innovative study of the author's fiction, Klinkowitz examines the forces in American life that have made Vonnegut's works possible. Vonnegut shared with readers a world that includes the expansive timeline from the Great Depression, during which his family lost their economic support, through the countercultural revolt of the 1960s, during which his fiction first gained prominence. Vonnegut also explored the growth in recent decades of America's sway in art, which his fiction celebrates, and geopolitics, which his novels question. A pioneer in Vonnegut studies, Jerome Klinkowitz offers The Vonnegut Effect as a thorough treatment of the author's fiction—a canon covering more than a half century and comprising twenty books. Considering both Vonnegut's methods and the cultural needs they have served, Klinkowitz explains how those works came to be written and concludes with an assessment of the author's place in American fiction.

Starting in the 1960s, a group of radically new fiction writers began having success at reinventing the novel and short story for postmodern times. Chief among them were Kurt Vonnegut, Jerzy Kosinski, Donald Barthelme, Ronald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, Clarence Major, and Gilbert Sorrentino. Although their work proved puzzling to reviewers and did not fit the conventions familiar to academic critics, these writers found an ally in a young reader named Jerome Klinkowitz. Hired to teach Hawthorne and other nineteenth-century figures, Klinkowitz found his deepest sympathies (and most lifelike affinities) to be with Vonnegut and company instead. Beginning in 1969 he published the first scholarly essays on Vonnegut, Kosinski, Barthelme, and the others in turn. By 1975 he was ready to write Literary Disruptions, a literary history of what he called this "post-contemporary" period. Since then he has written more than thirty books on contemporary fiction and its allied developments in cultural history, art, music, politics, and philosophy. Keeping Literary Company details Klinkowitz's work with these writers—not just researching their fiction and other publications, but introducing them to one another and taking part in the business-world activities that spread news of their innovations. He shows how what they wrote was so much a part of those turbulent times that a new literary generation found itself defined in such works as Slaughterhouse-Five, Being There, and Snow White. Here is a fascinating, first-person account of what these important figures wrote, how they wrote it, and what it means in the development of American fiction.

Here for the first time is the complete short fiction of one of the twentieth century's foremost imaginative geniuses. More than half of Vonnegut's output was short fiction, and never before has the world had occasion to wrestle with it all together. Organized thematically—"War," "Women," "Science," "Romance," "Work Ethic versus Fame and Fortune," "Behavior," "The Band Director" (those stories featuring Lincoln High's band director and nice guy George Hemholtz), and "Futuristic"—these ninety-eight stories were written from 1941 to 2007, and include those Vonnegut published in magazines and collected in Welcome to the Monkey House, Bagombo Snuff Box, and other books; here for the first time five previously unpublished stories; as well as a handful of others that were published online and read by few. During his lifetime Vonnegut published fewer than half of the stories he wrote, his agent telling him in 1958 upon the rejection of a particularly strong story, "Save it for the collection of your works which will be published someday when you become famous. Which may take a little time." Selected and introduced by longtime Vonnegut friends and scholars Dan Wakefield and Jerome Klinkowitz, Complete Stories puts Vonnegut's great wit, humor, humanity, and artistry on full display. An extraordinary literary feast for new readers, Vonnegut fans, and scholars alike.

“A free-wheeling vehicle . . . an unforgettable ride!”—The New York Times Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat’s Cradle is one of the twentieth century’s most important works—and Vonnegut at his very best. “[Vonnegut is] an unimitative and inimitable social satirist.”—Harper’s Magazine “Our finest black-humorist . . . We laugh in self-defense.”—Atlantic Monthly

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