While Mortals Sleep_ Unpublished Short Fiction - Kurt Vonnegut [0]
BY KURT VONNEGUT
A Man Without a Country
Armageddon in Retrospect
Bagombo Snuff Box
Between Time and Timbuktu
Bluebeard Breakfast of Champions
Canary in a Cat House
Cat’s Cradle
Deadeye Dick
Fates Worse Than Death
Galápagos
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Happy Birthday, Wanda June
Hocus Pocus
Jailbird
Like Shaking Hands with God (with Lee Stringer)
Look at the Birdie
Mother Night
Palm Sunday
Player Piano
The Sirens of Titan
Slapstick
Slaughterhouse-Five
Timequake
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
Welcome to the Monkey House
While Mortals Sleep is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents, fictional and factual, are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The writings by Kurt Vonnegut in this collection have been edited only minimally from the originals. Typographical and minor factual errors have been corrected.
Copyright © 2011 by The Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Trust
Foreword © 2011 by Dave Eggers
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DELACORTE PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Cover illustration by Kurt Vonnegut. Copyright © 1977 Kurt Vonnegut / Origami Express, LLC. www.vonnegut.com
For complete credits for the original illustrations by Kurt Vonnegut contained in this work, see this page.
eISBN: 978-0-440-33987-8
www.bantamdell.com
Jacket design: Lynn Buckley
Cover illustration by Kurt Vonnegut
copyright © 1997 Kurt Vonnegut/
Origami Express, LLC/www.vonnegut.com
Author photograph: © 1994 by Rosemary Carroll
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FOREWORD
by Dave Eggers
I’ve been thinking a lot about what we lost when we lost Kurt Vonnegut, and the main thing that keeps coming to mind is that we lost a moral voice. We lost a very reasonable and credible—though not to say staid or toothless—voice who helped us know how to live.
With the internet, god bless it, we are absolutely overrun with commentary and opinions. Can’t tell just yet, but so far, this seems fine. The access for everyone—commentators and their audiences—is more democratically available, and this is surely good. We have a million or so people offering daily advice, insight, perspective, and the occasional attempt to help us live in better harmony with our planet and our fellow humans. On the other hand, to get attention on the internet (and on television, for that matter), a commentator, more often than not, has to be loud, radical, or insane. And so the vast majority of such commentary is all three.
Then we have our novelists and short-story writers. By comparison, these people seem sane and well mannered. The catch is, they are, by and large, very quiet. They toil in the woods or on campuses or in Brooklyn, and they are so polite that they would never tell anyone, let alone their readers, how to live. And so the majority of contemporary literature, though it truly is brilliant and wonderful in myriad ways, is also free of moral instruction.
Now, I’m not saying that literature must tell us how to live, or must offer clear moral directives. No. No. I’m not saying that, internet commentators. But I am saying that it’s okay for some contemporary literature to do so. In a pluralistic literary environment—and we need such a thing, we need to maintain it, to nourish it so that dozens of styles and genres can coexist free of the misguided notion that there is one miraculous form that obviates all others—in such an environment, couldn’t there be a few writers who come out and say, “This is bad, that is good?”
But precious few writers do so. We have collectively shrunk from any clear instructive point in our work. As a result, our short stories—let’s talk, here, about short stories primarily, given our present context—are full of lovely