If This Isn't Nice, What Is? (Much) Expanded Second Edition by Kurt Vonnegut

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? (Much) Expanded Second Edition by Kurt Vonnegut

Best known as one of America's most astonishing and enduring contemporary novelists, Kurt Vonnegut was also a celebrated commencement address giver. Vonnegut never graduated from college, so his words to any class of graduating seniors always carried the delight, and gentle irony, of someone savoring an achievement he himself had not had occasion to savor on his own behalf.
But about my Uncle Alex, who is up in Heaven now, Vonnegut, an avowed Humanist, would say sometimes in a graduation speech, one of the things he found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when they were happy. . . . We could be drinking lemonade in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, 'If this isn't nice, what is?'

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? includes eleven speeches and four pieces of journalism on related themes. Six of the fifteen are new to the second edition--on topics as wide-ranging as why it is that Kurt Vonnegut's dog loves people more than Kurt Vonnegut does, and what it feels like to be the most censored writer in America--and much, much more.

In each of these talks and short essays, Vonnegut takes pains to find the few things worth saying and a conversational voice to say them in that's funny and serious and joyful even if sometimes without seeming so.

Best known as one of America's most astonishing and enduring contemporary novelists, Kurt Vonnegut was also a celebrated commencement address giver. Vonnegut never graduated from college, so his words to any class of graduating seniors always carried the delight, and gentle irony, of someone savoring an achievement he himself had not had occasion to savor on his own behalf.
But about my Uncle Alex, who is up in Heaven now, Vonnegut, an avowed Humanist, would say sometimes in a graduation speech, one of the things he found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when they were happy. . . . We could be drinking lemonade in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, 'If this isn't nice, what is?'

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? includes eleven speeches and four pieces of journalism on related themes. Six of the fifteen are new to the second edition--on topics as wide-ranging as why it is that Kurt Vonnegut's dog loves people more than Kurt Vonnegut does, and what it feels like to be the most censored writer in America--and much, much more.

In each of these talks and short essays, Vonnegut takes pains to find the few things worth saying and a conversational voice to say them in that's funny and serious and joyful even if sometimes without seeming so.

Born in 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana, KURT VONNEGUT was one of the few grandmasters of modern American letters. Called by the New York Times the counterculture's novelist, his works guided a generation through the miasma of war and greed that was life in the US in the second half of the twentieth century. Vonnegut rose to prominence with the publication of Cat's Cradle in 1963. Several modern classics, including Slaughterhouse-Five, soon followed. And he wrote and published dozens of short stories. Given who and what I am, he once said, it has been presumptuous of me to write so well. Kurt Vonnegut died in New York in 2007.

A longtime friend of Kurt Vonnegut's, DAN WAKEFIELD edited and introduced Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, and is the author of the memoirs New York in the Fifties and Returning: A Spiritual Journey, and the novel, Going All the Way, which was made into a movie starring Ben Affleck. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana.

JEROME KLINKOWITZ, a scholar of mid-century American literature in general and Kurt Vonnegut in particular, is a professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. He is co-editor of The Vonnegut Statement and author of several books including The American 1960s. He lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

DAVE EGGERS is the founder of McSweeney's and is the author of many books, including Heroes of the Frontier, The Circle, A Hologram for the King, and What Is the What.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781609806972
ISBN 10	1609806972
Title	If This Isn't Nice, What Is? (Much) Expanded Second Edition
Author	Kurt Vonnegut
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Seven Stories Press,U.S.
Year published	2016-04-26
Number of pages	188
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable