Miss Temptation. She went barefoot and slept until noon every day. And, as noon drew near, the villagers on the main street would grow as restless as beagles with a thunderstorm on the way.

New Dictionary. I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway's dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everybody can spell and truly understand.

The Manned Missles. I think that scientific persons of the future will scoff at scientific persons of the present. They will scoff because scientific persons of the present thought so many important things were superstitions.

Adaptions. ''Who Am I This Time?'' was adapted to television for PBS in 1982. Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken star under Johnathan Demme's direction.

''Harrison Bergeron,'' starring Sean Astin and Christopher Plummer was put together for Showtime and later released on video December, 1995. ''Bergeron'' Director Bruce Pittman was nominated for Canada's Gemini for ''Best Direction in a Dramatic Program or Mini-Series.''

''All the King's Horses,'' ''The Euphio Question,'' ''Next Door,'' ''Epicac,'' and ''Fortitude'' are all on video as part of Showtime's ''Kurt Vonnegut's 'Monkey House.'' The shorts are well-done and feature some fairly notable acting talent such as Frank Langela and Ally Sheedy.

	Order your very own copy of Welcome to the Monkey House from Amazon.com. The Amazon site has 25 sample pages from the book.
	Complete text of ''Long Walk to Forever''
	New York Times review from 1968
	''Who Am I This Time?'' starring Susan Sarandon on video from Amazon.com
	''Kurt Vonnegut's 'Harrison Bergeron'' starring Sean Astin on video from Amazon.com
	CNN feature on Showtime's ''Harrison Bergeron''
	Three VHS cassettes full of Vonnegut stories: Showtime's ''Kurt Vonnegut's 'Monkey House'' on video from Amazon.com
	Kurt Vonnegut comments on the Showtime videos
	Text of ''Harrison Bergeron''

A Collection of
Short Works
1968

Contemporary Authors, 49. ''In addition to novels, plays and nonfiction, Vonnegut has also published two volumes of stories. Canary in a Cathouse brought together about half of his shorter fiction, and was later expanded with additional stories as Welcome to the Monkey House. All of the work collected here was penned from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s and appeared in a wide range of national magazines, including Playboy, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal and Fantasy and Science Fiction. In his preface to Welcome to the Monkey House Vonnegut seems to dismiss these stories as commercial efforts, describing them as 'samples of work I sold in order to finance the writing of novels,' and adding, 'Business is business.'

''Larry L. King, in the New York Times Book Review, states that 'Welcome to the Monkey House fails to enhance Kurt Vonnegut's reputation. There are only brief glimpses of the hilarious, uproarious Vonnegut whose black-logic extensions of today's absurdities into an imagined society of tomorrow at once gives us something to laugh at and much to fear. . . . The rather pitiful state of magazine fiction is what one remembers most about this book.' However, although Stanley Schatt, in his Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., grants that Vonnegut 'will probably be remembered for his novels and not for his short stories,' he does believe that some of the stories are 'certainly memorable.'

''Apart from judgments regarding its literary worth, Vonnegut's short fiction is of interest for the insights it can provide into his novels. Like his longer fiction, his stories tend to fall into two categories: contemporary tales reflecting Vonnegut's own experience, and those that can be clearly labeled as science fiction. As Schatt points out, variations on many of Vonnegut's recurrent themes can be found in his short stories, and a number of stories actually contain settings and characters that also appear in the novels. 'Epicac' is about the same super computer that controls society in Player Piano. Diane Moon Glompers appears as a character in both God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and 'Harrison Bergeron.'''

Set of Seven Welcomes Viewers to Vonnegut
by STEVE SLOSAREK

''Kurt Vonnegut, that bizarrely brilliant Indiana native son, has long been a favorite among contemporary literary types, but now videophiles can appreciate his works on their TV sets with the release of 'Kurt Vonnegut's Monkey House.'

''Vonnegut supervised the production, and he makes short introductions in the three-volume boxed set  which contains seven half-hour fantasy-science-fiction programs based on the author's critically acclaimed collection of short stories, Welcome to the Monkey House.

''The prophetic and sometimes frightening topics are laced with Vonnegut's customary wit and satire, delightfully tempering the seriousness.''

>>> More  

BOOK:  Welcome to the Monkey House  ·  NY Times Review SHOWTIME VIDEOS: Vonnegut's Comments  ·  Indianpolis Star Review HARRISON BERGERON VIDEO: CNN Feature

© 1997-2005 Chris Huber, Durham NC (USA)  ·  Last Updated 02/05/05

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