'Look at the Birdie' by Kurt Vonnegut
reviewed for ChuckPalahniuk.net by Joshua Chaplinsky

Vonnegut haunts us from the grave with another posthumous collection of effortless short fiction.

His second posthumous collection of prehumous stories, Look At The Birdie focuses on the unpublished early work of Vonnegut's formative years. Phantonymns aside, the stories that make up Birdie share a specific point in time. Whereas the stories in his previous collection, Armageddon in Retrospect, shared the themes of war and peace, the stories that make up Birdie paint a broad picture of post World War II America by nature of when they were written.

Author Sidney Offit brings up a good point in his affectionate foreword. Why have these stories never been published before? He speculates that as a master craftsman, these stories in some way didn't meet Vonnegut's exacting standards. If that's the case, has his family pulled a Dmitri Nabakov and selfishly published work the author would have rathered gone unread? To my knowledge, Vonnegut made no such request, so they are in the clear and we as readers get to capitalize. Whereas Nabakov's forthcoming The Original of Laura is an unfinished work in progress, the stories in Look At the Birdie are polished little gems, formed beneath the mantle of Vonnegut's skull in the high pressure conditions of his brain. You would need a jeweler's loupe to find any flaws.

Read the full review here!


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