Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage - Softcover

Vonnegut, Kurt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425134067 ISBN 13: 9780425134061

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 1992

Synopsis

“An anthology in which Vonnegut freely quotes himself on everything from art and architecture to madness and mass murder...Uncompromising.”—Los Angeles Times

“Honest and scarily funny, and it offers a rare insight into an author who has customarily hidden his heart.”—New York Times

Here we have a collection of essays and speeches by me, with breezy autobiographical commentary serving as connective tissue and splints and bandages. Here we go again with real life and opinions made to look like one big, preposterous animal not unlike an invention by Dr. Seuss...

—Kurt Vonnegut, from Fates Worse Than Death 

About this title

About the Author

Kurt Vonnegut was a master of contemporary American literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America’s attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him, in the words of The New York Times, as “a true artist” with the publication of Cat’s Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, “one of the best living American writers.” Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007.

From Kirkus Reviews

Return of the Old Rambler, doing a replay on his 1981 autobiographical collage Palm Sunday, this time pasting together a memoir from speeches, forewords, articles, and so on written since 1981. Norman Mailer invented this format with Advertisements for Myself (1959) and no one, including Mailer, has done it as well since. Vonnegut adds plenty of humor to his new model but not much sinew. There's something truly self-defeating about parenthetical asides that leave each page of copy slack with interruptions. He includes vague forewords to Franklin Library editions of his more recent novels; writes of his brushes with Salman Rushdie (who, despite a friendship with Vonnegut, shot down one of his novels, with Vonnegut seriously thinking of adding another team to the hit list on Rushdie); comments on the firebombing of Dresden; recalls dead friends who appeared in Slaughterhouse-Five and dead fellow novelists Nelson Algren, Donald Barthelme, Hemingway, James Jones, Irwin Shaw, and others; and discusses his own incompetence as a speech-writer, his dislike of or inability to read his own works, and a suicide attempt that was foiled by a stomach pump. Vonnegut pictures himself as a depressive, though his less-than-faint hope for humanity is not as corroded as Mark Twain's during his later years. Vonnegut's most well-developed theme is in the title, as he weighs fates worse than death, including crucifixion (enslavement by the Reverend Jim Jones of the Guyana Kool-Aid horror doesn't measure up). His most memorable moments are about his first wife Jane and her death from cancer; his architect father, who never got a chance to show his stuff; and his deep feelings for fellow Dresden POW Bernard V. O'Hare. Vonnegut writes best about people, while his think pieces are sliced up with asides or dry-gulched by his alter ego. Patchy. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0425134067
• ISBN 13: 9780425134061
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240