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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780425174463
ISBN number: 0425174468
Label: Berkley Trade
Manufacturer: Berkley Trade
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 384
Printing Date: August 01, 2000
Publishing house: Berkley Trade
Release Date: August 08, 2000
Sale Popularity Level: 53836
Studio: Berkley Trade
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
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 sucess 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 humour 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.
Amazon.com Review:
From out of the blue, here's a new collection of Vonnegut fiction--his very 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 humour and the humane, death-haunted melancholy of the young war veteran and tyro writer. This collection beats his very 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
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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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.
Rated by buyers 
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My long-time readers are aware of my predilection for the works of Mr. Vonnegut. In my online journal (The Soupletter 1993-2003) I reviewed his final novel, TIMEQUAKE, (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1997) and GOD BLESS YOU DR. KEVORKIAN, (Seven Stories Press, 1999), a collection of radio essays he wrote for New York public radio, as well as THE VONNEGUT STATEMENT, Jerome Klinkowitz & John Somer, Ed.s, (Dell, 1973), a scholarly look at the writer's career in mid-stream. Later, with Vonnegut's career winding down, I took a notion to see what I might have missed among his twenty or so book-length works and stumbled on the two I review here (which I am pretty sure completes my personal tour of his bibliography). BAGOMBO is comprised of short stories left out of WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE, the only other such collection, and by and large it is easy to see why they were left out the very first time around. Vonnegut says so himself in his excellent front and back matter, essays well worth the effort of locating the book -- the reader in a hurry can profitably skip most of the rest. In fact, the author admits in his afterword that he substantially re-wrote a few of the pieces he deemed unreadable. The chief value of the stories themselves, for Vonnegut fans, lies in their historicity. Early traces of the humor, the characters, the settings and the anguish of his later brilliant work are scattered here and there as the young writer learned his trade in the late 1940s and early 50s.
Rated by buyers -
This collection of stories were written in the 1950's ..long before Kurt Vonnegut became one of our country's finest satirists or writers of grey humor. The stories cover a wide range of subjects and sometimes lack the tremendous sidesplitting insight one expects when they sit down to read one of Vonnegut's novels. Therin lies a key point...these stories were written as a quick source of income to help Vonnegut be able to pay for his later novels that are so great. Having said that, the stories here which range from science fiction to domestic dilemmas are enjoyable and sometimes thought provoking stories. Some of the characters are quite memorable such as the music obsessed high school band director George M. Hemholtz who shows up in a number of the stories here. Some of the better stories here include A Present For Big Saint Nick, The No-Talent Kid, Souvenir, Lovers Anonymous, and 2BR02B but each of them offers a few little nuggets or something to make them enjoyable. Considering these stories were written so long ago, many have held up very well. This might not be CLASSIC Vonnegut, but you can pull hints of it out of Vonnegut's Bagombo Snuff Box and if you are a die-hard Vonnegut Fan this one will be too much to pass up!
Rated by buyers -
This book offers an entertaining set of Vonnegut's previously uncollected short stories, most of which were written in the 1950s and early 1960s. While the quality of the tales is not as good as those in his previously published Welcome to the Monkey House, anybody who is a fan of Vonnegut's work, or even someone who simply likes good stories, will enjoy this book.
Yet like all good fiction, Vonnegut's work is as valuable for its insights as for its ability to entertain. While the stories collected here are in a variety of genres, one theme does emerge from them - the hunger for distinction. From the title story to "The Package", "The Powder-Blue Dragon" to "Runaways," many of the stories are about people seeking something that distinguishes them from the rest of their world, usually somthing that is artificial or external to who they are. That these searches usually end in folly for the characters appears to illustrate Vonnegut's point - it is who we are as people that matters, not the trinkets we buy or the poses we adopt. Though hardly radical today, it is a point that offers an interesting contrast to the consumer-driven age that spawned such tales.
Rated by buyers -
There is a definite reason where the introduction bewares of this being Pre Vonnegutan days. There's the beginning of a master, some twists but that's all. Vonnegut is best known for his quirky, cynical twist on society. If anything in a lot of these stories he supports it. Especially when in "Lovers Anonymous" when he went on about magic markers and report cards, (you have to read it in order to know what I'm talking about.)
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