Kurt Vonnegut

This essay argues that Kurt Vonnegut blends a unique humanist stance into his absurdist plots and characters, ultimately urging readers to confront the absurd with a kindness and human decency his protagonists often find rare. As a result of this absurd and humanist synthesis, I defend and promote Vonnegut's place in the ...

Based on the calendar, we are almost a month into spring. By any notion of Western New York reality, that is a laugh. The winter jackets still hang on their hooks, above the boots near the door. The dogs need toweling off after walks in the woods, layers of ice and mud caught in their fur. We open the door in ...

In Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s shaggy but zingingly relevant comedy “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” now getting a ferociously funny revival from Wheelhouse Theater Company, Harold is a bombastic, bellowing, more than half-feral bully who returns to his family without warning. Like Odysseus of legend, he has a ...

Although they were about 10 years apart in age, beloved Indiana authors Dan Wakefield and Kurt Vonnegut always had one shared passion that they just couldn't stop talking about. “Shortridge [High School] was always very important to Kurt, and it's always been important to me too,” Wakefield reflects.

When NASA and SpaceX launched human sperm into space on April 1, it may have sounded a little like a science fiction story. And that's because four decades ago, it was. Famed author Kurt Vonnegut accidentally predicted the weird launching of sperm into space this year in his 1972 short story “The Big ...

In Kurt Vonnegut's work, I found a voice that spoke directly to my bizarre and sarcastic soul. His morbid comedy and dark satire perfectly captured my own outlook on life and modern society — namely, it had a lot of potential for good that was constantly being squandered away by materialism, technology, ...

Susan B. Anthony, Alexander Graham Bell, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Helen Keller, Leonard Nimoy, Elizabeth Taylor, Sylvia Plath, Dr. Seuss, Sojourner Truth and Kurt Vonnegut have all impacted the Pioneer Valley in one way or another. Tonight, at the Academy of Music, The ...

Twice a year society recognizes an event that helps me step back and take a longer view of life. For someone who lives — and dies — by a clock, twice a year I sit dumbfounded as the hours allotted to what we conveniently call “a day” either expand or contract. If you need to label it, please use the common ...

(Scientists have discovered more than a dozen types of ice crystals, including ice IX—which, unlike Kurt Vonnegut's fictional ice-nine, doesn't freeze up the world's oceans.) Ice VII is well known from lab studies of materials under high pressure, Tschauner says, but the samples he and his colleagues ...

Vin was on the air the night that John Lennon died in 1980, and he turned WNEW's airwaves into a kind of virtual wake, with callers sharing their grief. Along the way, he interviewed everybody from David Bowie to Suzanne Vega to Kurt Vonnegut. I met Vin when we were both working at WFUV in the Bronx, ...

An imagined conversation between two yeast cells appears in Kurt Vonnegut's 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions. "They were discussing the possible purposes of life," Vonnegut writes. If that's not absurd enough, their existential discussion takes place against a weird, dismal backdrop, "as they ate sugar ...

Kokomo Civic Theatre will be celebrating love with its February production, “Who Am I This Time? (and Other Conundrums of Love).” Set on the stage of the North Crawford Mask and Wig Club, three early comic masterpieces by Kurt Vonnegut are sewn together into a seamless evening of hilarity and ...

Don't worry, that's not a jab; it's the first line of “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” which debuts on the weekend of Friday, Feb. 16 at the San Juan Community Theatre. In one of about five plays Kurt Vonnegut Jr. ever wrote, the fiction writer recycles themes from many of his famous novels, like the realities of ...

For decades, Kurt Vonnegut was an unshakeable, if unconventional, part of the American literary canon: even if his books didn't find a lot of traction in academia, they were in every high school library. That's where I first encountered him, some time in the mid-1980s, when I was supposed to be getting a ...

Well, I work at a bookstore so I do see some people who don't like or don't know of Kurt Vonnegut and then I end up giving them a little masterclass. I've had a few people they come and they're like, "Hey, I want to start reading Kurt Vonnegut." And I was like, "How much time you got? All right, here's what I ...

A new piece from the editors of GQ says you can go ahead and toss that copy of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five," along with "The Catcher in the Rye," "Lord of the Rings" and the Bible. Heading into the weekend GQ published "21 Books You Don't Have to Read," an analysis of classic literary works ...

Everything will be beautiful and nothing will hurt when the Arts & Humanities Council presents Granfalloon: A Kurt Vonnegut Convergence on May 10 to 12 in Bloomington. The three-day conference and festival will honor the life and work of author Kurt Vonnegut with film screenings, music and more.

Eighteen months after the election, Trump is still holding campaign-style rallies in his strongholds. My literary hero, Kurt Vonnegut, didn't live long enough to witness these orgies of self-congratulation. But Vonnegut was exquisitely attuned to the class dynamics that prevail when plutocrats preach populism.