Title:: [[Slapstick]] Authors:: [[Kurt Vonnegut]] Tags:: #fiction #vonnegut #books #scifi Read:: [[2022-09-23]] ## Editions - Edition:: Delacorte, First Edition, 1976 - Original Copyright:: 1967 - Pages:: 243 ## Annotations I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected. Afterwards, I read the Updike review in The New Yorker and this observation is 👨‍🍳 😘: —— “Slapstick” enjoys a first printing of a cool one hundred thousand copies, and Vonnegut’s popularity, which has grown even as his literary manner becomes more truculent and whimsical, has attracted comment from many reviewers, who usually find it discreditable to author and audience alike. But there need be no scandal in Vonnegut’s wide appeal, based, as I believe it is, on the generosity of his imagination and the honesty of his pain. Who of his writing contemporaries strikes us as an imaginer, as distinguished from a reporter or a self-dramatizer? There is a fine disdain in Vonnegut of the merely personal. His prologue to “Slapstick” says, “I find it natural to discuss life without ever mentioning love,” and his fiction, stoic in an epicurean time, does have a pre-sexual, pre-social freshness; he worries about the sort of things—the future, injustice, science, destiny—that twelve-year-old boys worry about, and if most boys move on, it is not necessarily into more significant worries.  ______ And best for last: So excited to learn that the great [@haydendesser](https://www.instagram.com/haydendesser/) named an album after the nickname for the plague-decimated Manhattan. (Skyscraper National Park)