God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian - Kurt Vonnegut [11]
“Thank goodness there is no Hell,” I said.
“Enjoyed talking to you,” he said, “but I have to get back to work now—on a six-volume set about cockamamie Earthling beliefs in an Afterlife.”
“I myself would cheerfully settle for sleep,” I said.
“Spoken as a true humanist, he said, becoming more antsy by the second.
“One last question,” I begged. “To what do you attribute your incredible productivity?”
Isaac Asimov replied with but a single word: “Escape. And then he appended a famous statement by the similarly prolific French writer Jean-Paul Sartre:
“Hell is other people.”
THE END
KURT VONNEGUT (1922–2007) was among the few grandmasters of twentieth-century American letters, one without whom the very term American literature would mean much less than it does now. Vonnegut’s other books from Seven Stories Press include the national bestseller A Man Without a Country and, with Lee Stringer, Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation About Writing.
NEIL GAIMAN has written acclaimed books for both adults and younger readers, and has won many major awards, including the Hugo and Nebula. His novel The Graveyard Book was the only book to win both the Newbery (US) and Carnegie Medal (UK). His Times bestselling books include Coraline and Stardust (both adapted into films), American Gods, and Anansi Boys. His comics series The Sandman was described by the Los Angeles Times as “the greatest epic in the history of comic books.
SEVEN STORIES PRESS is an independent book publisher based in NewYork City, with distribution throughout the United States, Canada, England, and Australia. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Octavia E. Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Hwang Sok-yong, Peter Plate, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including the Boston Women’s Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Gary Null, Project Censored, Ted Rall, Barbara Seaman, Alice Walker, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can. For additional information, visit www.sevenstories.com.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
Introduction: A Word From Wnyc’s Reporter on the Afterlife
God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian
About the Author