Relentlessly fun to read.Dave Eggers Acollection of fourteen previously unpublished short stories from one of the most original writers in all of American fiction

In this series of perfectly rendered vignettes, written just as he was starting to find his comic voice, Kurt Vonnegut paints a warm, wise, and funny portrait of life in postWorld War II Americaa world where squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence.

Here are tales both cautionary and hopeful, each brimming with Vonneguts trademark humor and profound humanism. A family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. A man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. A quack psychiatrist turned murder counselor concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. While these stories reflect the anxieties of the postwar era that Vonnegut was so adept at capturingand provide insight into the development of his early stylecollectively, they have a timeless quality that makes them just as relevant today as when they were written. Its impossible to imagine any of these pieces flowing from the pen of another writer; each in its own way is unmistakably, quintessentially Vonnegut.

Featuring a foreword by author and longtime Vonnegut confidant Sidney Offit and illustrated with Vonneguts characteristically insouciant line drawings, Look at the Birdie is an unexpected gift for readers who thought his unique voice had been stilled foreverand serves as a terrific introduction to his short fiction for anyone who has yet to experience his genius.

Includes these never-before-published stories:

Confido
FUBAR
Shout About It from the Housetops
Ed Lubys Key Club
A Song for Selma
Hall of Mirrors
The Nice Little People
Hello, Red
Little Drops of Water
The Petrified Ants
The Honor of a Newsboy
Look at the Birdie
King and Queen of the Universe
The Good Explainer

[Look at the Birdie] brings us the late writers young voice as he skewerssometimes gently, always lethallypost World War II America.The Boston Globe