✩ 4/4.5 stars
~
[read for high school ‘junior year’ great books class]

I'm finished with this book but I can't finish it. I read to the end of the short story that gives this collection its title. It featured women who had been numbed from the waist down who were rescued by a freethinking man from a totalitarian dystopia. They are all grateful (in retrospect) to be raped by him. I can't waste any more of my life on loudly declaimed misogyny, either in a sci-fi future or a beatnik past.

Vonnegut is a master of the long form. Anyone who has read one of his novels knows that. I came into this collection of short stories waiting to be disappointed. Vonnegut is a master of the short form as well. I shouldn't have doubted him. From his earliest days, Vonnegut was a gifted, insane, magical writer, shown by his depth in his early stories included in this collection. I saw the special edition on the bookstore shelf and immediately pounced on it. This is surely the definitive edition, coming with a wonderful look at Vonnegut's writing process when he wrote the title story in 1968. As I continue my journey through Vonnegut's oeuvre, I am looking forward to more masterpieces from this intrepid author.

The most haunting thing about this collection is that the nature of humanity stares at you in the face through these ridiculous, sometimes verging of science fiction stories. And it's a very scary thing for an author be able to hold up a mirror to humanity and say, "Here, that's you. Do you see it?"

Short stories ranked with all favorites having brief descriptions of reasons I liked them (spoiler, I liked this whole collection but I have less to say about the others):
"The Manned Missiles" - Okay, so I'm a bit confused as to why I liked this one better than the title story or even "Harrison Bergeron," but this story made me unexpectedly feel more than any of the others. I think it had a lot to do with the way these fathers' boys are described and how we got a sense of their personalities. Anyways, highly recommend.
"Welcome to the Monkey House" - Wow, Kurt Vonnegut really found a way to comment on the amount of rape that happened in the past and continues to happen.
"Harrison Bergeron" - I can't even begin to describe my emotions toward this short story. It's so, so heartbreaking. Mostly the first three short stories I've ranked are tied.
"Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog" - Okay, this is a crazy one, but humorous.
"The Foster Portfolio" - The ending of this one had me fully invested in how Vonnegut paints character portraits.
"Report on the Barnhouse Effect" - This one is one of my favorite science fiction stories for sure. I love how Vonnegut can make such absurd scenarios scientific.
"EPICAC" - This one, too, is absurd and heartbreaking.
"Who Am I This Time?" - This is a surprising favorite. The premise doesn't sound interesting, but I truly loved it. It was, indeed, very clever.
"Unready to Wear" - This one is so haunting, exploring the question of what would happen if humanity could leave bodies behind. I could see this being a book, and I'm very sad it isn't.
"The Euphio Question" - Ah, a short story about profiting off of potentially dangerous, life-altering schemes. Where have I seen that storyline before? Excuse me while I check the news headlines and list all of them.
"Next Door" - I also was surprised by how much I loved this one. The child is like an absurd hero, but the situation goes wrong. Very clever.
"Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" - Again, returning to the idea of the burden of the bodies. The overcrowding.
"More Stately Mansions"
"Long Walk to Forever"
"All the King's Horses"
"Adam"
"The Hyannis Port Story"
"The Kid Nobody Could Handle"
"Where I Live"
"New Dictionary"
"Deer in the Works"
"The Lie"
"Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son"
"Miss Temptation"

Nobody:
Kurt Vonnegut: 'I can construct an ethical argument for rape.'

But seriously, this is a good book. Kurt uses science fiction to create reductio ad absurdum's that explore human nature and morality. Brilliantly insightful, both thoughtful and thought provoking.

I shall add this to my list of 'Books Absolutely Everybody Should Read'.

Noped the fuck out of this one when the titular story turned into one long apology/endorsement for rape.

25 short stories that are satirical and thought-provoking about social conditions and norms. I liked Epicac the best or it made me laugh the most.

This is a master class in the art of short story writing. Every short story is finely crafted. Many have humor, many have heartbreak, many have subtle romance.

Almost all have commentary on society, especially American society, that is as relevant today as it was in the 1950s.

What are these stories missing?

You reader. It's missing you to unlock their meaning and beauty.

In the 70s I taught this at community colleges, and it was wildly popular--the three scifi pieces on future overpopulation, or taking the joy out of sex ("ethical birth control") astute. The Cape Cod autobiographical shorts are wonderful views of an enviable past--the Yacht Club on the Bay side that is barely a shed, etc. My students could talk about this book for days, and did--though I never came up with paper assignments that evoked their best writing.
Not sure why. Maybe Vonnegut's own prose is deceptively simple-seeming. It's not, but I never managed to explore his voice in a way that they could employ in their own writing--whereas I did exactly that for other writers at the time: VS Naipaul, Saul Bellow, GB Shaw.

Vonnegut's war critiques are acid and on the money; I then thought, and may still, his Slaughterhouse-Five the only "war" novel actually about war, except maybe All Quiet. War and Peace certainly is not; it's about a whole society, and the interruption of war. The soldier (and history teacher) executed for stealing in Dresden--beautiful, especially when I taught Henry the Fifth in the same semester, with Bardolph coming to a similar end for stealing a French religious symbol, a "pax."

This is a collection of short stories that Vonnegut wrote between 1950 and 1968. The stories range from war-time epics to futuristic social commentaries. In the introduction, Vonnegut explains that these stories helped to keep him financially afloat while he was working on his true aspiration - novels. The stories were published in various magazines and other publications, and were corralled into Welcome to the Monkey House in 1968.

Each story is incredibly unique and forward-thinking, especially considering the time that they were written. For example, Vonnegut creates a world where everyone is equal in Harrison Bergeron, to the extreme that those with advantages have to be handicapped. Smart people wear hearing-aid devices that blast loud noises every twenty seconds so they can’t think clearly and beautiful people wear ugly masks. Only the average people are allowed to live without handicaps.

The story titled Report on the Barnhouse Effect is about a man who has discovered the ability to control objects with his mind. He learns of this while in the military, playing craps in the barracks. The man can control the dice, and make them land however he wishes. But he is not interested in using this power for personal gain, and realizes that it is too dangerous for the public to learn. He disappears and begins to rid the world of its weapons by destroying them remotely, making it impossible for the nations of the world to wage war.

Each story is well-developed and well-written. Welcome to the Monkey House is definitely worth checking out, and would make a great introduction to Vonnegut.

4/5 Stars. 331 pages. Published 1968.

A Compendium of Curmudgeonly Humour

Kurt Vonnegut is a curmudgeon. Curmudgeons are often misunderstood and taken for irascible pedants. On the contrary, they are anything but pedantic. Curmudgeons are introverts who are simply tired of adapting themselves to the demands of an extrovert world. They want to be left alone. Which is why they occasionally write or say nasty things to annoy people. The hope is that other people will then have something to talk about with each other and give the curmudgeon some peace.

A curmudgeon like Vonnegut is the opposite of a totalitarian. A curmudgeon knows the world around him and its imperfections through direct experience. But he is wary of turning his opinions, of which he has many, into policies. This is just as well because his opinions are anything but consistent. He has learned over the years that consistency is indeed the sign of a trivial mind which would like to impose order on a universe that is inherently chaotic.

Curmudgeons are male by definition because they fear the power of women and have no defences against it. Female power arises from the inherent male incompetence in things like communication and relationship-building. Sisterhood is a mystery which manifests to him as a hive-mind and he dares not mess with it. The curmudgeon knows he is deficient and relies on women to suffer frustration and annoyance in his presence. He is aware of this sufferance and, as a mark of respect, neither contradicts nor criticises his female companions. They in turn accept the deal as the best they are likely to get and desist from all attempts to improve him.

A curmudgeon is not without charm in certain situations, primarily those in which he is forced to respond to the opinions - usually political, but sometimes anthropological - of others, particularly blowhards and dilettantes. In such circumstances his remarks are likely intended not to convince but to undermine. He perceives this as healthy cynicism. The charm emanates from the fact that he doesn’t mind what anyone else thinks of him. The combination of the unexpected and the absence of obvious banality helps.

VONNEGUT SNIPPETS // eclectic and varied collection of short works by the 20th-century icon

• Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 1968.

"I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that may help others... I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and i am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful."
[From the Preface]

Gathering dozens of stories from 1950-1968, this collection showcases Vonnegut's range and imagination. Many stories take a folksy tone that often reminded me of Ray Bradbury's nostalgics like "Dandelion Wine", while others veer into the speculative witty sci-fi that KV is largely known for.

Since many of the stories were published before any of his novels, a reader familiar with his work can see the seeds that will germinate into full-fledged novels later in his writing life.

Highlights for me:
• Harrison Bergeron
• The Foster Portfolio
• Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog
• The Hyannis Port story
• More Stately Mansions
• Unready to Wear

Some themes in these: equalizing all human abilities and features, a secret life as a jazz pianist, Edison's dog being the real inventor, a time capsule story of the 1962/63 political landscape, delusions of grandeur in suburbia, and an early look at transhumanism/ post-body existence.

The title story had a intriguing premise regarding a future world dealing with overpopulation and went sour real fast for me - and many others based on some web searches. It is probably best described as "problematic" in modern parlance...

My vintage copy includes a list where these stories were originally published, ranging from mid-century US literary magazines like Colliers, The Atlantic to more "lifestyle" mags like Playboy and Ladies Home Journal.