Complete Stories

For completists, this will be like a boxed set of a musician's early work - Vonnegut's Sun Studio sessions ... It's fascinating to watch him work themes that would later animate his 14 novels and five books of nonfiction: the cruel stupidity of war, the dehumanizing dangers of technology, the distillation of American values into mere greed and selfishness.... An extraordinary heart exists behind these stories. --Jess Walter, New York Times Book Review There are wonderful lines, sentences, and whole paragraphs throughout the collection; it is full of constructions that are funny, clever, and unexpected.... Generosity and decency seem to be the two qualities Vonnegut values most, even as he recognizes their fragility and rarity.--Geoff Nicholson, Los Angeles Review of Books Vonnegut's writing explodes with disquieting warnings and lessons that continue to ring true for contemporary readers. --Huffington Post Kurt Vonnegut: Complete Stories is a deep dive into one of the great minds in American literature: morally serious, formally adventurous, and topically diverse. A reader could happily spend years wandering around in this book. --Matthew Sharpe, bestselling author of The Sleeping Father and Jamestown This book is big in size and significance ... Meant to get readers thinking, these stories both preserve a lost world and showcase Vonnegut's phenomenal prescience. In his foreword, Dave Eggers pinpoints another key trait: Vonnegut wrote moral stories meant to tell us what's right and what's wrong, and . . . how to live. In our time of dangerous ambiguity, Vonnegut's clarity is restorative, his artistry and imagination affirming. --Booklist A sterling collection of the late Vonnegut's corpus of short fiction, with several unpublished pieces to balance better-known published and anthologized work.... Essential for Vonnegut completists, of course-and budding writers can always learn a thing or two from the sardonic master. --Kirkus Reviews, starred review