Kurt Vonnegut
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Prepare Yourself Citizens!
In The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson has not only visited a nation curtained from the rest of the world, but has recreated it with compassion and humanity. The result is a relentless examination of what it means to be…
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Vonnegut’s Nuclear Bow-tie
Twenty years before Slaughterhouse-Five, a broke Kurt Vonnegut came up with an idea for an atomic bow-tie. While he became known for his environmentalism later in life, in 1950, Vonnegut—like America at large—seemed ready to cash-in on the atomic. “By…
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Surely Some Revelation Is at Hand
(Yet Another) Rumpus Lamentation: It’s a sunny winter day in Tucson, Arizona. There’s an event being held in the parking lot of a supermarket called Safeway.
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Jake Cline: The Last Book I Loved, Mother Night
If he had not been such a pacifist, Kurt Vonnegut would have made a hell of a boxer. I say this knowing full well that Vonnegut was not an impressive physical specimen. His posture was miserable, his countenance was haggard…
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Lapham’s Bows to the Great Goddess
“Arts & Letters,” the Spring issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, is perhaps the magazine’s most unabashed celebration of nostalgia yet, which is saying a lot for a publication that indulges as much in the work of Sappho and Seneca as it…
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Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
The year I met Steve Almond was also the year I picked up (Not That You Asked) and the year I read his gorgeous homage to Kurt Vonnegut, “Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt.”
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Morning Coffee
Still have to work out a few minor tech problems, but we’re back. On eco-peril and how the Nazca caused their own collapse. Inflatable street art. Kurt Vonnegut’s book covers redesigned at last. How does one measure the distance between…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Good morning, world. This week, the blogs are full of fun. Many of them had wondrous posts having to do with lovable, humorous, classic sci-fi authors like Vonnegut and Bradbury and Adams. It was a week made for me. Also,…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
This week, the book blogs are full of answers. Listen to them. Vonnegut knew why we are all such drama queens (there are charts involved). A thought-provoking take on writing a satisfying ending. The Book Bench points out that CNN…
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Sex and the Witty
There’s Something Wrong with Sven combines imaginative leaps worthy of Calvino and Vonnegut with tragicomic irreverence of the George Saunders variety.
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Josh Nathan: The Last Book I Loved, Slapstick
I began reading Kurt Vonnegut after I had slid too far down to climb back up the slide of becoming a full-blown pessimist. I remember feeling this during a month long trip to Mexico. I saw villages with homes made…
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A Rabid Fan of the Novel Revolutionary Road Compares It to the Film
It has come to my attention that you keep adapting my favorite novels [see Atonement, Revolutionary Road, et. al.], and turning them into mediocre movies. Cease and desist! Get your own ideas!