Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s

Description

A collection of autobiographical writings by the most zanily imaginative and brilliantly barking commentator of the post-war era This is the second volume of Vonnegut's autobiographical writings - a collage of his own life story, snipped up and stuck down alongside his views on everything from suicidal depression to the future of the planet and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Honest, dark, rambling, funny; this rare glimpse of Vonnegut's soul is a dagger to the heart of Western complacency.

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. An army intelligence scout during the Second World War, he was captured by the Germans and witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. After the war he worked as a police reporter, an advertising copywriter and a public relations man for General Electric. His first novel Player Piano (1952) achieved underground success. Cat's Cradle (1963) was hailed by Graham Greene as 'one of the best novels of the year by one of the ablest living authors'. His eighth book, Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969 and was a literary and commercial success, and was made into a film in 1972. Vonnegut is the author of thirteen other novels, three collections of stories and five non-fiction books. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.

An American cultural hero celebrated for his wry, loonily imaginative commentary on war, apocalypse, technology, materialism and other afflictions... One of the last of a generation of great American novelists of World War II * Los Angeles Times * Like listening to the monologue of an interesting man whose tongue has been loosened by just one glass of wine * Guardian * Fates Worse Than Death is honest and scarily funny, and it offers a rare insight into an author who has customarily hidden his heart * New York Times * A truly great work of moral philosophy * The Age * Fates Worse Than Death is the latest volume of his cunning, rambling, edgy sermonettes, his wry, moral bomblets chucked night after night from podium and pulpit into gatherings of shrinks and museologists, Anglicans, architects, MIT graduands and the like. Rumours that the old boy was losing his knack of drilling straight into the nerve of western complacency can, on the evidence of this marvellously tetchy wit, be discounted. * Observer *