Kurt Vonnegut
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Kurt Vonnegut’s Crazy Amazing TV Show
A seemingly unemployed wannabe poet, Stony secures the opportunity by winning the “Blast-Off Space Food” jingle contest and, despite confused protest from his mother, is whisked away to undergo an intensive, three-month astronautic crash course. Would you believe us if…
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Advice from Vonnegut
Advice my father gave me: never take liquor into the bedroom. Don’t stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. To celebrate Kurt Vonnegut, Maria Popova posted on her Brain Pickings an interesting list of advices the author…
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Vonnegut and the Shapes of Stories
As Jerome Stern showed with his writing guide Making Shapely Fiction, stories have shapes. Kurt Vonnegut thought so too, and, inspired by the similarities between the profiles of the New Testament and “Cinderella,” he plotted out several of those shapes in his…
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The Present and Future of Adobe Books
If you, like Kurt Vonnegut, are a fan of Adobe Books, you’ll be happy to hear that after all the twists, turns, and loop-de-loops of the past few months, the beloved bookstore has raised enough money to stay open as…
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Kurt Vonnegut Loved Adobe Books, And You Should Too
Here’s a lovely addition to the ongoing up-again-down-again saga of Adobe Books: Herbert Gold describes Kurt Vonnegut’s last trip to San Francisco, during which the two visited the “eternal no-rent bookshop.” Vonnegut ended up signing a $1.95 used copy of Slaughterhouse…
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Requited love for Brain Pickings
Brain Pickings continues the conversation on Kurt Vonnegut. It all started with the recent publication of We are What We Pretend to Be: The First and Last Works followed by our interview with Vonnegut’s daughter Nanette. In ongoing musings on authors in love,…
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Veterans Weekend Rumpus Roundup
If you spent the weekend honoring the veterans in your life or otherwise celebrating Veterans Day, you may have missed these excellent Rumpus pieces. Don’t worry, it’s not too late to read them! On what would have been his 90th…
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“Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt”
Three years ago yesterday, in honor of Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday, we reprinted Steve Almond’s homage to the late author, “Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt.” “The main thing was that Vonnegut made an impact on readers. He wasn’t one of those recluses who hid…
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The Rumpus Interview with Nanette Vonnegut
To commemorate what would have been Kurt Vonnegut’s 90th birthday, The Rumpus sits down with Nanette Vonnegut for an exclusive interview about her father, his legacy, and his writing…
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Kurt Vonnegut and Other “Inveterate Doodlers”
Sylvia Plath may not be best known for her paper dolls, but we don’t usually envision Mark Twain as an avid fan of scrapbooking, either. Check out this cool collection of the artwork of famous authors, which also includes William…
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“I Was There”
William Dereseiwicz’s luminous response to Kurt Vonnegut’s oeuvre recently printed by the Library of America, is a critique as much as it is hero-worship. Dereseiwicz confronts Vonnegut’s novels from his earliest to his last, focusing on Vonnegut’s zenith in moral seriousness and…
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Grieving for Writers I’ve Never Known
Five years ago on a tiny island in the Aegean, I cried for Kurt Vonnegut as I sat in the tub, holding in one hand the long, low-pressure shower hose and in the other, a coffee mug full of red…