Download or read book The Vonnegut Encyclopedia written by Marc Leeds and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now expanded and updated, this authorized compendium to Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, stories, essays, and plays is the most comprehensive and definitive edition to date. Over the course of five decades, Kurt Vonnegut created a complex and interconnected web of characters, settings, and concepts. The Vonnegut Encyclopedia is an exhaustive guide to this beloved author’s world, organized in a handy A-to-Z format. The first edition of this book covered Vonnegut’s work through 1991. This new and updated edition encompasses his writing through his death in 2007. Marc Leeds, co-founder and founding president of the Kurt Vonnegut Society and a longtime personal friend of the author’s, has devoted more than twenty-five years of his life to cataloging the Vonnegut cosmos—from the birthplace of Kilgore Trout (Vonnegut’s sci-fi writing alter ego) to the municipal landmarks of Midland City (the midwestern metropolis that is the setting for Vonnegut’s 1973 masterpiece Breakfast of Champions). The Vonnegut Encyclopedia identifies every major and minor Vonnegut character from Celia Aamons to Zog, as well as recurring images and relevant themes from all of Vonnegut’s works, including lesser-known gems like his revisionist libretto for Stravinsky’s opera L’Histoire du soldat and his 1980 children’s book Sun Moon Star. Leeds provides expert notes explaining the significance of many items, but relies primarily on extended quotations from Vonnegut himself. A work of impressive scholarship in an eminently browsable package, this encyclopedia reveals countless connections readers may never have thought of on their own. A rarity among authors of serious fiction, Kurt Vonnegut has always inspired something like obsession in his most dedicated fans. The Vonnegut Encyclopedia is an invaluable resource for readers wishing to revisit his fictional universe—and those about to explore it for the first time. Praise for The Vonnegut Encyclopedia “An essential collection for fans of the singular satirist.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Indispensable.”—Publishers Weekly “If you’re somebody who has read one Kurt Vonnegut book then there’s a chance you’ve read them all. For the devout reader of Vonnegut there’s a voracious sense of completism. And, Marc Leeds and his new [The Vonnegut] Encyclopedia are here to guide you through it all. Just don’t blame him if you become unstuck in time while you’re reading.”—Inverse “Vonnegut enthusiasts will be delighted with Leeds’s exhaustive, almost obsessive, treatment of the characters, places, events, and tantalizingly mysterious references for which Vonnegut’s five-decade writing career is celebrated. . . . A wonderful and beautifully designed reference source.”—Booklist (starred review) “Leeds’s scholarship and genuine love for his subject matter render this encyclopedia a treasure trove for Vonnegut readers.”—The Nameless Zine

Download or read book The Vonnegut Encyclopedia written by Marc Leeds and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now expanded and updated, this authorized compendium to Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, stories, essays, and plays is the most comprehensive and definitive edition to date. Over the course of five decades, Kurt Vonnegut created a complex and interconnected web of characters, settings, and concepts. The Vonnegut Encyclopedia is an exhaustive guide to this beloved author’s world, organized in a handy A-to-Z format. The first edition of this book covered Vonnegut’s work through 1991. This new and updated edition encompasses his writing through his death in 2007. Marc Leeds, co-founder and founding president of the Kurt Vonnegut Society and a longtime personal friend of the author’s, has devoted more than twenty-five years of his life to cataloging the Vonnegut cosmos—from the birthplace of Kilgore Trout (Vonnegut’s sci-fi writing alter ego) to the municipal landmarks of Midland City (the midwestern metropolis that is the setting for Vonnegut’s 1973 masterpiece Breakfast of Champions). The Vonnegut Encyclopedia identifies every major and minor Vonnegut character from Celia Aamons to Zog, as well as recurring images and relevant themes from all of Vonnegut’s works, including lesser-known gems like his revisionist libretto for Stravinsky’s opera L’Histoire du soldat and his 1980 children’s book Sun Moon Star. Leeds provides expert notes explaining the significance of many items, but relies primarily on extended quotations from Vonnegut himself. A work of impressive scholarship in an eminently browsable package, this encyclopedia reveals countless connections readers may never have thought of on their own. A rarity among authors of serious fiction, Kurt Vonnegut has always inspired something like obsession in his most dedicated fans. The Vonnegut Encyclopedia is an invaluable resource for readers wishing to revisit his fictional universe—and those about to explore it for the first time. Praise for The Vonnegut Encyclopedia “An essential collection for fans of the singular satirist.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Indispensable.”—Publishers Weekly “If you’re somebody who has read one Kurt Vonnegut book then there’s a chance you’ve read them all. For the devout reader of Vonnegut there’s a voracious sense of completism. And, Marc Leeds and his new [The Vonnegut] Encyclopedia are here to guide you through it all. Just don’t blame him if you become unstuck in time while you’re reading.”—Inverse “Vonnegut enthusiasts will be delighted with Leeds’s exhaustive, almost obsessive, treatment of the characters, places, events, and tantalizingly mysterious references for which Vonnegut’s five-decade writing career is celebrated. . . . A wonderful and beautifully designed reference source.”—Booklist (starred review) “Leeds’s scholarship and genuine love for his subject matter render this encyclopedia a treasure trove for Vonnegut readers.”—The Nameless Zine

Download or read book The Vonnegut Encyclopedia written by Marc Leeds and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1995 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authorized source for rediscovering Vonnegut, this encyclopedia provides a comprehensive descriptive catalog of characters, themes, phrasing, and imagery found in Kurt Vonnegut's novels, short stories, plays, and essays.

Download or read book Kurt Vonnegut written by Kurt Vonnegut and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Times Book Review

Download or read book Kurt Vonnegut written by James Lundquist and published by Frederick Ungar. This book was released on 1977 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapters include Cosmic Irony, Science Fiction and The New Reality of Slaughterhouse-Five.

Download or read book Breakfast of Champions written by Kurt Vonnegut and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 1973 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author questions the condition of modern man in this novel, depicting a science fiction writer's struggle to find peace and sanity in the world.

Download or read book New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut written by D. Simmons and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-04 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kurt Vonnegut's darkly comic work became a symbol for the counterculture of a generation. From his debut novel, Player Piano (1951) through seminal 1960's novels such as Cat's Cradle (1963) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) up to the recent success of A Man Without A Country (2005), Vonnegut's writing has remained commercially popular, offering a satirical yet optimistic outlook on modern life. Though many fellow writers admired Vonnegut - Gore Vidal famously suggesting that "Kurt was never dull" - the academic establishment has tended to retain a degree of scepticism concerning the validity of his work. This dynamic collection aims to re-evaluate Vonnegut's position as an integral part of the American post-war cannon of literature.

Download or read book Complete Stories written by Kurt Vonnegut and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book We Are What We Pretend To Be written by Kurt Vonnegut and published by Vanguard Press. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kurt Vonnegut's first and last works come together for the first time in print, in a collection aptly titled after his famous phrase, We Are What We Pretend To Be.

Download or read book Lucky Mud Other Foma written by Christina Jarvis and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating deep dive into Kurt Vonnegut’s oeuvre and legacy, illuminating his unique perspective on environmental stewardship and our shared connections as humans, Earthlings, and stardust. Vonnegut’s major apocalyptic trio—Cat’s Cradle, Slapstick, and Galápagos—prompt broad global, national, and species-level thinking about environmental issues through dramatic and fantastic scenarios. This book, Lucky Mud and Other Foma, tells the story of the origins and legacy of what Kurt Vonnegut understood as “planetary citizenship” and explores key roots, influences, literary techniques, and artistic expressions of his interest in environmental activism through his writing. Vonnegut saw writing itself as an act of good citizenship, as a way of “poisoning” the minds of young people “with humanity . . . to encourage them to make a better world.” Often that literary activism meant addressing real social and environmental problems—polluted water, soil, and air; racial and economic injustice; isolating and dehumanizing technologies; and lives and landscapes desolated by war. Vonnegut’s remedies took many forms, from the redemptive power of the arts to artificial extended families to vital communities and engaged democracies. Reminding us of our shared connections as humans, as Earthlings, as stardust, Lucky Mud helps fans, scholars, and book lovers of all kinds experience how Vonnegut’s writings purposely challenge readers to think, create, and love.

Download or read book Venus on the Half Shell written by Philip José Farmer and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disaster sends a man across the universe in search of answers to life’s big questions in this humorous classic adventure by a Science Fiction Grand Master. When a massive flood wipes out Earth and spoils his date, lone survivor Simon Wagstaff finds refuge in an abandoned Chinese spaceship, the Hwang Ho. Accompanied by three new companions—a dog, an owl, and a beautiful robot—and his electric banjo, Wagstaff sets off on an extraterrestrial adventure. He travels from planet to planet, seeking the definitive answer to the ultimate question: Why are we created if only to suffer and die? Of course, after he drinks an elixir granting him eternal life, the real question is what to do for the rest of eternity after he answers his first question . . . “Lively and inventive and goes by faster than a holiday weekend.” —The Washington Post “A comedy of sexual mores, an investigative search for Love, a lampoon of people who require answers to imponderable questions.” —Science Fiction Review “Not only a science-fiction epic of the most incredible proportions, but it is also a satiric-fantasy, a clever parody of its own genre.” —The Daily Eastern News

Download or read book The Eden Express written by Mark Vonnegut and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Eden Express describes from the inside Mark Vonnegut’s experience in the late ’60s and early ’70s—a recent college grad; in love; living communally on a farm, with a famous and doting father, cherished dog, and prized jalopy—and then the nervous breakdowns in all their slow-motion intimacy, the taste of mortality and opportunity for humor they provided, and the grim despair they afforded as well. That he emerged to write this funny and true book and then moved on to find the meaningful life that for a while had seemed beyond reach is what ultimately happens in The Eden Express. But the real story here is that throughout his harrowing experience his sense of humor let him see the humanity of what he was going through, and his gift of language let him describe it in such a moving way that others could begin to imagine both its utter ordinariness as well as the madness we all share.

Download or read book Love Kurt written by Kurt Vonnegut and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A never-before-seen collection of deeply personal love letters from Kurt Vonnegut to his first wife, Jane, compiled and edited by their daughter “A glimpse into the mind of a writer finding his voice.”—The Washington Post “If ever I do write anything of length—good or bad—it will be written with you in mind.” Kurt Vonnegut’s eldest daughter, Edith, was cleaning out her mother’s attic when she stumbled upon a dusty, aged box. Inside, she discovered an unexpected treasure: more than two hundred love letters written by Kurt to Jane, spanning the early years of their relationship. The letters begin in 1941, after the former schoolmates reunited at age nineteen, sparked a passionate summer romance, and promised to keep in touch when they headed off to their respective colleges. And they did, through Jane’s conscientious studying and Kurt’s struggle to pass chemistry. The letters continue after Kurt dropped out and enlisted in the army in 1943, while Jane in turn graduated and worked for the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. They also detail Kurt’s deployment to Europe in 1944, where he was taken prisoner of war and declared missing in action, and his eventual safe return home and the couple’s marriage in 1945. Full of the humor and wit that we have come to associate with Kurt Vonnegut, the letters also reveal little-known private corners of his mind. Passionate and tender, they form an illuminating portrait of a young soldier’s life in World War II as he attempts to come to grips with love and mortality. And they bring to light the origins of Vonnegut the writer, when Jane was the only person who believed in and supported him supported him, the young couple having no idea how celebrated he would become. A beautiful full-color collection of handwritten letters, notes, sketches, and comics, interspersed with Edith’s insights and family memories, Love, Kurt is an intimate record of a young man growing into himself, a fascinating account of a writer finding his voice, and a moving testament to the life-altering experience of falling in love.

Download or read book The American Midwest written by Andrew R. L. Cayton and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-08 with total page 1918 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first-ever encyclopedia of the Midwest seeks to embrace this large and diverse area, to give it voice, and help define its distinctive character. Organized by topic, it encourages readers to reflect upon the region as a whole. Each section moves from the general to the specific, covering broad themes in longer introductory essays, filling in the details in the shorter entries that follow. There are portraits of each of the region's twelve states, followed by entries on society and culture, community and social life, economy and technology, and public life. The book offers a wealth of information about the region's surprising ethnic diversity -- a vast array of foods, languages, styles, religions, and customs -- plus well-informed essays on the region's history, culture and values, and conflicts. A site of ideas and innovations, reforms and revivals, and social and physical extremes, the Midwest emerges as a place of great complexity, signal importance, and continual fascination.

Download or read book Kindred written by Octavia Butler and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2024-05-21 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “As you turn the pages of this novel and get lost in Dana’s story, allow yourself to relive the horrors of slavery....Allow yourself to know the pain of our nation’s past.”—Tomi Adeyemi, New York Times bestseller and Hugo and Nebula award-winning author, from the new foreword This brand new package for young adults includes a redesigned interior for better readability, specially commissioned cover art by Carlos Fama, metallic stock cover, and spot gloss on cover elements “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times). “Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.” —N. K. Jemisin

Download or read book Hall of Mirrors Short Story written by Kurt Vonnegut and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2009-10-20 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Look at the Birdie is a collection of fourteen previously unpublished short stories from one of the most original writers in all of American fiction. In this series of perfectly rendered vignettes, written just as he was starting to find his comic voice, Kurt Vonnegut paints a warm, wise, and often funny portrait of life in post–World War II America—a world where squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. In this disquieting tale, the investigation into a string of mysterious disappearances turns surreal for two detectives, when they pay a visit to the home of a celebrated hypnotist. But who will turn the tables on whom when the final spell is cast? Hall of Mirrors and the thirteen other never-before-published pieces that comprise Look at the Birdie serve as an unexpected gift for devoted readers who thought that Kurt Vonnegut's unique voice had been stilled forever—and provide a terrific introduction to his short fiction for anyone who has yet to experience his genius.

Download or read book The Crying of Lot 49 written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.