Kurt Vonnegut
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Vonnegut in the House of Magic
Asked years later why he had chosen to write science fiction in his early days, Kurt replied “There was no avoiding it, since the General Electric Company WAS science fiction.” Over at Work in Progress, Ginger Strand shows us how…
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #4: Water, Water, Everywhere
It’s hard to escape news about water these days. Drought on the West Coast, hurricane season raging on the East Coast, and NASA found water on Mars. No matter where you are, these books will drench you.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Song in the Subjunctive
Perhaps the city looked more poignantly lovely because I was conscious of its tragic history.
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Albums of Our Lives: Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm
We could hear the muffled roar of the show booming through the walls of the historic building. We were drunk, pretending to be music writers. We were giddy with our trespass.
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Repeating Death
Placed after a mention of death or dying, Kurt Vonnegut’s “So it goes” refrain throughout Slaughterhouse Five utilizes repetition to explore the inevitability of death. Over at the Ploughshares blog, E.V. De Cleyre considers how Kurt Vonnegut uses repetition in relation…
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Kingdom of the Blind
So it goes. Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Cat’s Cradle has been optioned for television, setting the gears in motion for an adaptation of a book Vonnegut himself gave an A+ grade. With such great source material, hopefully the series won’t…
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The Rumpus Interview with Robert Repino
Robert Repino talks about his debut novel, Mort(e), the publishing industry, science fiction and literary fiction, writing about religion, and how to write about complex chemical ant languages.
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Voting With Champions
A roundtable of authors choose their favorite Vonnegut work for The Oyster Review. Unsurprisingly, Cat’s Cradle came out ahead with a pretty strong hand.
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The Disappointing Grandfather
After hailing Kurt Vonnegut as the “grandfather” on her “literary family tree,” Kathleen Founds describes the experience of reading his short story, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” at BuzzFeed Books. The experience, she writes, was “akin to opening a box…
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Grieving, Not Grammar
In a little more than two weeks, in a Hospice unit tucked away at the edge of the Atlantic, in Brunswick, North Carolina, a free grief-writing workshop will be held. When Vonnegut urged his students to “write a poem, tear…
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No Time To Be Neurotic
The Believer has just published what is likely writer Peter Matthiessen’s last interview, conducted only a month before his death. Included: Jaws, the sticker that Kurt Vonnegut left on Matthiessen’s car, and why Matthiessen didn’t like to write about New York: I also…
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Great American Novels and Wars
In his newly published The Novel: a Biography, Michael Schmidt takes some time to study how the wars of the 20th century shaped the great American novel, citing Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Joseph Heller among those that best dealt…