Kurt Vonnegut: Letters
Kurt Vonnegut
This collection of Vonnegut’s letters is the autobiography he never wrote – from the letter he posted home upon being freed from a German POW camp, to notes of advice to his children: ‘Don’t let anybody tell you that smoking and boozing are bad for you. Here I am fifty-five years old, and I never felt better in my life’. Peppered with insights, one-liners and missives to the likes of Norman Mailer, Gunter Grass and Bernard Malamud, Vonnegut is funny, wise and modest. As he himself said: ‘I am an American fad—of a slightly higher order than the hula hoop’.
Like Vonnegut’s books, his letters make you think, they make you outraged and they make you laugh. Written over a sixty-year period, and never published before, these letters are alive with the unique point of view that made Vonnegut one of the most original writers in American fiction.
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About Kurt Vonnegut
Reviews for Kurt Vonnegut: Letters
Jane Shilling
Sunday Telegraph Seven
One closes this volume...full of gratitude for Dan Wakefield...the editor of this labour of love that gives us one more reason to love Kurt Vonnegut
John Sutherland
The Times
This collection is perhaps the best insight into the everyday needles of a prolific author you could hope to read
Ed Caesar
Sunday Times
Splendidly assembled and edited by Dan Wakefield . . . [Vonnegut’s] familiar, funny, cranky, acute voice . . . is chronicling his life in real time.
New York Times Book Review
Droll and self-deprecating letters offer intriguing insights into Vonnegut’s life
Sunday Times
This miraculous volume of selected letters provides a moving and revelatory portrait of the famed author of Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle. . . . Fans will find the collection as spellbinding as Vonnegut’s best novels, and casual readers will discover letters as splendid in their own way as those of Keats.
Publisher's Weekly
A laughing prophet of doom
New York Times
Unimitative and inimitable social satirist
Harper's
A satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion, a cynic who wants to believe
Jay McInerney Splendidly assembled and edited
Kurt Andersen
Scotsman