Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction

Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction
by Kurt Vonnegut

Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction
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Book Summary Information

Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2000-08-01
ISBN: 0425174468
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Berkley Trade

Book Reviews of Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction

Book Review: Vonnegut
Summary: 5 Stars

I discovered Vonnegut when I was around 12 or 13. I instantly fell in love with every single one of his books I could get my hands on. And after all these years he is still one of my favorite authors. And this book of short stories is wonderful, especially if you are really busy or have a short attention span.

Summary of Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction

Never-before-collected, vintage Vonnegut.

"Vonnegut said that his last book, Timequake (1997), would be his last, but no one as imaginative and in love with language and story can resist the lure of the page, and it's obvious that he had a grand time working on this collection of his vintage stories. [Bagombo Snuff Box] resurrects Vonnegut's earliest efforts, stories written during the fifties and sixties for such popular venues as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. In his engagingly autobiographical introduction, Vonnegut describes his stints as a Chicago journalist and PR man for General Electric in Schenectady, New York; his decision to supplement his income by writing; and his rapid success and evolution into a full-time writer. So, here are his literary roots, a set of stories that reflects their era's eagerness to turn the horrors of war into anecdote and to equate technology with progress. Unabashedly fablelike, they can be either sly or sweet, sentimental or vaudevillian, but all are quietly subversive....Rich in low-key humor and good old-fashioned morality, Vonnegut's stories are both wily and tender." --Booklist

"You trust this voice...the pretentious are all brought to earth with his wit...These stories...speak only of simple truths." --Chicago Sun-Times

"Vonnegut's voice is one of the most original in popular American fiction." --San Francisco Chronicle

"He is a satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopie cushion." --Jay McInerney, The New York Times

"A word cartoonist, a wise guy, a true subversive!" --Valerie Sayers, The New York Times Book Review

"You've got to love him." --The Washington Post Book World
Never before available in book form--these early stories were only published in magazines such as Atlantic Monthly and Saturday Evening Post
Includes a wonderful autobiographical introduction, with a fascinating glimpse of his previous careers and literary beginnings.
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

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt Books

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