We Are What We Pretend To Be

Nature, 10/24/13 “Vonnegut’s first and last pieces are pervaded by his trademark dark humour.” Hudson Valley News, 10/16/13 “Written forty years apart, these two pieces share the typical Vonnegut voice. And if you love his work, you will want to add this book to your collection.” John Shelton Ivany Top 21, Issue #434 “Turn off the electronics and put aside your contemporary crises, for what stands before us is a truly transhistorical story teller that deserves at least one read. This book should be our first, and our last, concern.”

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) is one of the most beloved American writers of the twentieth century. Vonnegut’s audience increased steadily since his first five pieces in the 1950s and grew from there. His 1968 novel Slaughterhouse-Five has become a canonic war novel with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 to form the truest and darkest of what came from World War II. Vonnegut began his career as a science fiction writer, and his early novels- Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan- were categorized as such even as they appealed to an audience far beyond the reach of the category. In the 1960s, Vonnegut became closely associated with the Baby Boomer generation, a writer on that side, so to speak. Now that Vonnegut’s work has been studied as a large body of work, it has been more deeply understood and unified. There is a consistency to his satirical insight, humour and anger which makes his work so synergistic. It seems clear that the more of Vonnegut’s work you read, the more it resonates and the more you wish to read. Scholars believe that Vonnegut’s reputation (like Mark Twain’s) will grow steadily through the decades as his work continues to increase in relevance and new connections are formed, new insights made.

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