Category: Kurt Vonnegut

Links: First-Time Callers

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo, Jay McInerney, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Sarvas, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison

Hello there. There’s a goodly chance that you’re here today because Mark Sarvas was nice enough to include this blog on his list of ten “Really, Really Smart Literary Blogs.” I feel a bit like the little old lady whose hair is still in curlers when the Prize Patrol van arrives, but I appreciate your swinging by. If this is your first time here, a few “greatest hits” posts you might want to look at: my piece on the best books of 2008, some stray thoughts on Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, a few more on the future of book reviewing, a guide to Haruki Murakami‘s translations of American authors, and some thoughts about best practices about for DIY publishing. I usually do link roundup like this once a week, but as with many things in life, this is changeable. Onward.

Don DeLillo‘s America points to a cache of DeLillo radio
interviews on YouTube.

Jay McInerney talks to the Wall Street Journal about his new story collection, How It Ended which includes an update on the life of Alison Poole, the protagonist of his novel Story of My Life. Poole was modeled after one of his ex-girlfriends, Rielle Hunter, perhaps better known for her attachment to former presidential candidate John Edwards.

One less teacher is using Toni Morrison‘s Beloved in the classroom. Kids are still using The Scarlet Letter to learn about public humiliation, though.

The Daily Iowan catches up with longtime Kurt Vonnegut confidante Loree Rackstraw; make sure to check out the slideshow, which has some fine images of Vonnegutiana in Rackstraw’s home.

It’s the 25th anniversary of Sandra Cisneros‘ The House on Mango Street. At a recent event at Rice University honoring the book, she offered some of the best advice for writers I’ve heard: “First, you write like you’re talking to someone in your pajamas. Then you revise like your enemy is reading it.”

Back to Dresden

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Kurt Vonnegut, Kyle Smith

This month marks the publication of Loree Rackstraw‘s Love as Always, Kurt, a collection of correspondence the author had with Kurt Vonnegut for four decades. The two were friends and sometimes lovers, which would seem to make for an intriguing story, but the book has received middling reviews for not delving too deep into the writer’s mind. That may explain why the small brushfire that Kyle Smith created in his review of the book has little to do with the book’s actual content. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Smith takes a few swipes at what he perceives as Vonnegut’s simpleminded politics, going so far as to knock down the central thesis of Slaugherhouse-Five—that the bombing of Dresden was utterly pointless and spoke to the larger pointlessness of war.

I’m no World War II scholar, and I don’t know if Smith is right. (And Smith, the film critic for the New York Post, is no WWII scholar; I know him mainly through A Christmas Caroline, a fluffy, throwaway comic novel from a couple of years back that merged Dickens and The Devil Wears Prada.) But his review has spawned some lively chatter both on the Journal’s letters page and in the comments of Smith’s blog, which has spawned a discussion not just of the Dresden bombing but of the utility of war in general. The conversation remained civil, which may speak to the power of Vonnegut’s light touch—it may be the only blog comment thread in history that discusses Nazis without exploding into a fireball of hate.