⇒ Read Free Welcome to the Monkey House A Collection of Short Works Kurt Vonnegut Jr 9780385333504 Books

Welcome to the Monkey House A Collection of Short Works Kurt Vonnegut Jr 9780385333504 Books

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Welcome to the Monkey House A Collection of Short Works Kurt Vonnegut Jr 9780385333504 Books

Please note that my rating is about the quality of the Kindle edition, not the quality of Vonnegut's writing.

On the one hand, the short stories are wonderful and showcase some of Vonnegut's earlier writing. On the other hand, the Kindle edition would likely embarrass any author, and particularly one whose precision of language was equal to Kurt Vonnegut's. Specifically, the book appears to have been created by scanning a hard copy and then using optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert the images to letters, without making an effort to even so much as electronically verify that the OCR got it right (e.g. even a Word grammar checker would have turned up most of the obvious mistakes). This results in an almost verbatim rendering of the original, but not quite. In the Kindle version it is quite jarring to find, for example, the word "mat" appearing nonsensically in the middle of some sentences where the word "that" was plainly intended. Two examples: "It was in this news mat Nancy perceived a glint of hope" or "Why, honey bunch, they call mat truth serum." Mostly, "that" shows up correctly, but not always. Perhaps the most obnoxious example is in the short story "Deer in the Works" where a character's name is first given as "Lou Flammer" then inexplicably switches for a few pages to "Lou Hammer" and then switches back to last name "Flammer" again. Vonnegut doesn't make those sorts of mistakes. Kindle does, and it is a shame to do it to a writer of such ability. Nevertheless, what Vonnegut writes in these short stories are entertaining, thought provoking, disturbing, and somewhat of a time capsule for the mindset of America in the 1950s and early 60s. My only suggestion is to buy a hard copy version and read what Vonnegut actually wrote, instead.


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Welcome to the Monkey House A Collection of Short Works Kurt Vonnegut Jr 9780385333504 Books Reviews

As well known as Vonnegut has been for years, I never recall having read anything by him before. This collection of short stories was a delightful experience for me! Vonnegut is so clever in providing wild endings to these short tales--you don't see what is coming, but then find yourself asking yourself "Well, why not?" Makes me sorry I waited so long to experience Vonnegut's kind of humor.
Watched an old interview of kurt Vonnegut on Jon Stewart and Jon Stewart said it was Vonnegut's books that got him through his adolescence. I am experiencing my mid life adolescence. My son has schizo effective disorder hearing voices and seeing things. Some have explained this as a rather sane reaction to a crazy world. If the way humans behave doesn't make you crazy then you have the mental health problems not the other way around. What amazed me most is that many of these stories were written over sixty years ago. When I see the date of publication of the stories I am shocked - they are all relevant to problems we have today. All are stories that reflect Mr Vonnegut's love of humanity and his sadness with the lack of broad perspective we have as a group. I suspect some of the personal tragedies in his life led to this depth of insight in his writing. Every story in this collection is a gem. I only wish he were still alive so I could thank him for helping me to get through this difficult part of my life. Recommend to anyone and everyone.
This is a great collection of some of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story work from the 1950s. It has a couple dozen short stories in it, including the title story “Welcome to the Monkey House,” which catalogues a world in which the government has figured out how to remove the orgasm from sex (for the benefit of mankind, of course).

This book contains the story “Harrison Bergeron,” which is about a future in which everyone with even a trace of superior talent, intelligence, or coordination is forced to wear “handicaps” designed to partially disable them mentally or physically, so that they won’t have an unfair advantage over those less gifted. (A great short film was later made from this story.) Eerily, this seems suggestive of where we are headed today with all the recent talk of creating “equality of outcomes.”

Modern readers should bear in mind that these were written in the 1950s, and some occasionally violate a few of today’s social conventions to make the reader think, or stray into areas that some modern readers may nowadays consider politically incorrect. I liked all of these stories, and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to anyone with an open mind that is capable of reading between the lines and grasping the bigger message without being offended by something superficial in a story line.

I noticed that some readers who bought the edition complained about it numerous errors and bad proofing. I noticed that those particular complaints all seem to be dated 2013 or earlier. My copy is a edition purchased in mid-2014, and do not recollect having any such issues with it.
Please note that my rating is about the quality of the edition, not the quality of Vonnegut's writing.

On the one hand, the short stories are wonderful and showcase some of Vonnegut's earlier writing. On the other hand, the edition would likely embarrass any author, and particularly one whose precision of language was equal to Kurt Vonnegut's. Specifically, the book appears to have been created by scanning a hard copy and then using optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert the images to letters, without making an effort to even so much as electronically verify that the OCR got it right (e.g. even a Word grammar checker would have turned up most of the obvious mistakes). This results in an almost verbatim rendering of the original, but not quite. In the version it is quite jarring to find, for example, the word "mat" appearing nonsensically in the middle of some sentences where the word "that" was plainly intended. Two examples "It was in this news mat Nancy perceived a glint of hope" or "Why, honey bunch, they call mat truth serum." Mostly, "that" shows up correctly, but not always. Perhaps the most obnoxious example is in the short story "Deer in the Works" where a character's name is first given as "Lou Flammer" then inexplicably switches for a few pages to "Lou Hammer" and then switches back to last name "Flammer" again. Vonnegut doesn't make those sorts of mistakes. does, and it is a shame to do it to a writer of such ability. Nevertheless, what Vonnegut writes in these short stories are entertaining, thought provoking, disturbing, and somewhat of a time capsule for the mindset of America in the 1950s and early 60s. My only suggestion is to buy a hard copy version and read what Vonnegut actually wrote, instead.