Kurt Vonnegut: Letters by Kurt Vonnegut
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BYNewsweek/The Daily Beast - The Huffington Post - Kansas City Star - Time Out New York - Kirkus Reviews
This extraordinary collection of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Kurt Vonnegut's fiction. Written over a sixty-year period, these letters, the vast majority of them never before published, are funny, moving, and full of the same uncanny wisdom that has endeared his work to readers worldwide. Included in this comprehensive volume: the letter a twenty-two-year-old Vonnegut wrote home immediately upon being freed from a German POW camp, recounting the ghastly firebombing of Dresden that would be the subject of his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five; wry dispatches from Vonnegut's years as a struggling writer slowly finding an audience and then dealing with sudden international fame in middle age; righteously angry letters of protest to local school boards that tried to ban his work; intimate remembrances penned to high school classmates, fellow veterans, friends, and family; and letters of commiseration and encouragement to such contemporaries as Gail Godwin, G nter Grass, and Bernard Malamud. Vonnegut's unmediated observations on science, art, and commerce prove to be just as inventive as any found in his novels--from a crackpot scheme for manufacturing atomic bow ties to a tongue-in-cheek proposal that publishers be allowed to trade authors like baseball players. (Knopf, for example, might give John Updike's contract to Simon and Schuster, and receive Joan Didion's contract in return.) Taken together, these letters add considerable depth to our understanding of this one-of-a-kind literary icon, in both his public and private lives. Each letter brims with the mordant humor and openhearted humanism upon which he built his legend. And virtually every page contains a quotable nugget that will make its way into the permanent Vonnegut lexicon. - On a job he had as a young man: Hell is running an elevator throughout eternity in a building with only six floors.
- To a relative who calls him a great literary figure I am an American fad--of a slightly higher order than the hula hoop.
- To his daughter Nanny: Most letters from a parent contain a parent's own lost dreams disguised as good advice.
- To Norman Mailer: I am cuter than you are. Sometimes biting and ironical, sometimes achingly sweet, and always alive with the unique point of view that made him the true cultural heir to Mark Twain, these letters comprise the autobiography Kurt Vonnegut never wrote. Praise for Kurt Vonnegut: Letters Splendidly assembled . . . familiar, funny, cranky . . . chronicling Vonnegut's] life in real time.--Kurt Andersen, The New York Times Book Review
This collection is] by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and mundane. . . . Vonnegut himself is a near-perfect example of the same flawed, wonderful humanity that he loved and despaired over his entire life.--NPR
Congenial, whimsical and often insightful missives . . . one of Vonnegut's] very best.--Newsday
These letters display all the hallmarks of Vonnegut's fiction--smart, hilarious and heartbreaking.--The New York Times Book Review From the Hardcover edition.
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.
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 | 9780385343756 |
| ISBN 10 | 0385343752 |
| Title | Kurt Vonnegut: Letters |
| Author | Kurt Vonnegut |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Delacorte Press |
| Year published | 2012-10-30 |
| Number of pages | 436 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |