Nanette Vonnegut, daughter of Slaughterhouse Five author Kurt, wrote a letter to Harper’s to correct a parenthetical assertion in the October “New Books” column that she was once married to mustachioed talk show host Geraldo Rivera. She was not, but her sister was. Read More
More than any writer of his era, Kurt Vonnegut survives as an image: haggard, mustachioed, nicotine-stained, his hair a tangle—a cat’s cradle, one might say—of curls. As was often noted, he looked like Mark Twain, only cuter. Certainly, he was more boyish than Twain. He was a millionaire who rued, until he died, that his mother had not been a better hugger; a grown man who went swimming, sheepishly, in pants; a father who “painted pertinent quotes on various walls in the house.” He was 6’3″, but small at heart. “If the government assigned heights based on maturity,” he wrote in a letter to his first wife, Jane, “[I] would be much shorter.” Read More
Last week The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) canvassed writers living and dead—an eclectic selection including Jonathan Franzen, Zoë Heller, George Bernard Shaw and Gertrude Stein—for their opinion of the semicolon. Perhaps the most vehement response came from the late Kurt Vonnegut: “If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be Read More
Morris Dickstein of The Los Angeles Times wonders if some kind of literary generation has passed away along with the death of Norman Mailer, Grace Paley and Kurt Vonnegut this year. He wrote that, "Critics love the idea of literary generations, but it would be a challenge to find themes or ideas to link Read More
Get out your anti-war paint. The Godlight Theatre Company is bringing the staged adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five or: The Children’s Crusade is coming to Off-Broadway. Previews will start on Jan. 11 at 59E59 Theaters and run until Feb. 17.
According to Godlight, "Kurt Vonnegut’s absurdist classic, adapted by Read More
No writer was more competitive, or ambitious, than Norman Mailer. But if sales are the measure of the public’s mind, then honors clearly belong to Kurt Vonnegut, according to the Associated Press.
According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of industry sales, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five has sold about 280,000 copies since Read More
Famous Last Words have been the object of fascination ever since famous people started uttering them. Caesar said “And you, Brutus?” Oscar Wilde made the joke about the ugly curtains.
To the disappointment of the many who held Kurt Vonnegut in similar esteem, the writer was robbed of any significant last words when he Read More
Here’s an idea: To honor the memory of Kurt Vonnegut, let’s declare a new national holiday—Vonnegut Day.
The idea of Vonnegut Day is simple: Wearing Kurt Vonnegut mustaches and wigs, we will try, for one day, to live by the principles he espoused in his beautiful books: honesty, outrage, righteous grumpiness, kindness, Read More
Andrew Cuomo got the nation's largest student loan company to curb its business practices and pay $2 million to educate the public about the industry.
Unlike George Pataki, Eliot Spitzer based his federal PAC in New York.
Joe Bruno promised to a problem with the Saratoga Springs.
Christine Quinn is getting Read More
I was leaving New York for good. At 22—less than a year after arriving in the city—I’d had enough. While many friends were settling into their lives—enjoying the bars and restaurants and new people—I spent that winter falling out of mine. I was in the middle of a painful and never-ending breakup. I was watching Read More
