I realized I never posted any thoughts on this after I finished it.
First of all, it was wonderful to have a new Kurt Vonnegut book to read. This is silly for me to say, because I haven’t even read all of his novels yet. However, it was exciting to read his first post-posthumously published work.
Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of short fiction and non-fiction. The introduction by his son, Mark Vonnegut, is great. It was interesting to read about Kurt from someone who knew him so well.
One cool inclusion in the collection is the scanned pages of a letter Kurt wrote in 1945 to inform his family (who had no idea of his whereabouts) that he had been a prisoner of war and survived the Dresden bombing.
Kurt Vonnegut’s home town of Indianapolis declared 2007 the “Year of Kurt Vonnegut.” Kurt was to return home in April to speak to the community at a big kickoff event for the celebration. Sadly, he died two weeks before he was supposed to give the speech. He had already written the speech, and his son Mark went to Indianapolis to deliver the speech in his memory. The text of this speech is also included in this collection.
The above mentioned pieces were my favorite parts of the book. I also enjoyed the short stories, but I prefer the non-fiction in this collection.
One more thing to note about this book: it’s a beautiful edition. It has beautiful paper, and drawings by Kurt are included throughout, some in color.
Mark Vonnegut on whether or not we can expect more posthumously published work by his father:
“We’ll catch our breath and see how this one goes. There is a ton of unpublished stuff. We’ll figure it out as we go along.”
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