Bagombo Snuff Box : Uncollected Short Fiction - Softcover

Kurt Vonnegut

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099282968 ISBN 13: 9780099282969

Publisher: Random House, 2000

Synopsis

For this unusual collection, Kurt Vonnegut has selected 24 of his favourite stories never published before in book form. Included are "Any Reasonable Offer", "The Powder Blue Dragon", "Hal Irwin's Magic Lamp" and "Lovers Anonymous".

About this title

Review

From out of the blue, here's a new collection of Vonnegut fiction--his first magazine stories from the 1950s in book form at last, with some charming reminiscences (and three new endings for old stories) by the author. Vonnegut says these tales were meant to be as evanescent as lightening bugs, and that image captures their frail magic. They're like time travelers from an epoch when stories swarmed in mass-market magazines, before TV dawned and doomed them.

Later greatness glimmers here: the offbeat sci-fi of "Thanasphere" (in which an astronaut encounters dead souls in space) and the hero's bogus adventures in alien lands in "Bagombo Snuff Box" look forward to Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, as do the war stories "Souvenir," "Der Arme Dolmetscher," and "The Cruise of The Jolly Roger," which incorporate and amplify Vonnegut's actual war experiences. There's authentic midcentury news here, even in the gentle Saturday Evening Post social satire of "The No-Talent Kid," "Ambitious Sophomore," and "The Boy Who Hated Girls," which pretty much nail the high-school marching band experience. The pieces are peppered with odd, true observations and neat little turns of phrase: one incompetent kid in Lincoln High's band marches "flappingly, like a mother flamingo pretending to be injured, luring alligators from her nest."

You can't miss the ironic humor and the humane, death-haunted melancholy of the young war veteran and tyro writer. This collection beats his first novel, Player Piano, and anticipates the masterpiece Cat's Cradle, whose tiny chapters resemble short stories. Young Vonnegut is derivative, mostly of Saki and O. Henry, partly because he couldn't think of endings, and their switcheroos offered a handy model. But from the start, Vonnegut's idiosyncratic voice is unmistakable. --Tim Appelo

From the Back Cover

From the acclaimed author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and Timequake comes this new compilation of short fiction, twenty-three previously uncollected stories. These vignettes of American life draw on Kurt Vonnegut's World War Two experiences and the resolute optimism of the country after the war. Together, they present a poignant and humorous portrayal of an America peopled with overzealous high school band directors and their students ("Ambitious Sophomore"), rebellious housewives ("Custom-Made Bride") and boasting salesmen ("Bagombo Snuff Box"), soldiers misplaced during the war ("Der Arme Dolmetscher") and people lost in their own gadget-filled homes ("The Package").

In an era before television, Kurt Vonnegut found a ready and willing audience in the readers of such magazines as Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Argosy, and Redbook. These rare, rediscovered tales give us a glimpse into a more innocent America -- and into the developing genius of one of the greatest writers of our time.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0099282968
• ISBN 13: 9780099282969
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224