Kurt Vonnegut: Letters

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9780345535399
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Grouped Work ID6755e66d-4859-0f12-a4a8-0428f3bc147e
Grouping Titlekurt vonnegut letters
Grouping Authorkurt vonnegut
Grouping Categorybook
Grouping LanguageEnglish (eng)
Last Grouping Update2024-03-27 03:08:25AM
Last Indexed2024-03-27 03:13:50AM

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author
Vonnegut, Kurt
author_display
Vonnegut, Kurt
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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
Newsweek/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, Günter 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...
format_catalog
eBook
format_category_catalog
eBook
id
6755e66d-4859-0f12-a4a8-0428f3bc147e
isbn
9780345535399
last_indexed
2024-03-27T07:13:50.226Z
lexile_score
-1
literary_form
Non Fiction
literary_form_full
Non Fiction
primary_isbn
9780345535399
publishDate
2012
publisher
Random House Publishing Group
recordtype
grouped_work
title_display
Kurt Vonnegut Letters
title_full
Kurt Vonnegut Letters
title_short
Kurt Vonnegut
title_sub
Letters
topic_facet
Biography & Autobiography
History
Literary Criticism
Nonfiction

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