He's going to be 83 on November 11th, and Kurt Vonnegut is on a roll. I've heard that he's been photographed and interviewed for the cover of Rolling Stone. The issue should appear in the next month.
As well, check out Tony Scott's lovely essay about our all-time favorite writer in yesterday's New York Times Book Review.
Vonnegut has a bestseller right now in “A Man Without a Country,” a short book that collects his recent writings and speeches. It's published by Seven Stories, a tiny outfit that literally begged Vonnegut to help them. They would not survive if they didn't have a writer of his magnitude. He accepted, and now they're both on top.
And isn't this a propitious time for a Vonnegut renaissance? His novels Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle, as well as the brilliant Mother Night, catapulted him to fame during the late 60s as an anti-war writer. Vonnegut knows from the horrors: he survived the bombing of Dresden, Germany at the end of World War II, and it has informed his entire oeuvre. We need him now more than ever.
“Can I tell you the truth?” he writes in “A Man Without a Country.”
“Here's what I think the truth is: we are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little if left of what we're hooked on.”
Vonnegut to make cover of Rolling Stone
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