If This isn't Nice, What is?: Advice for the Young: Advice To the Young - Hardcover

Kurt Vonnegut

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1609805917 ISBN 13: 9781609805913

Publisher: Seven Stories Press,U.S., 2014

Synopsis

Best known as one of our most astonishing and enduring contemporary novelists, Kurt Vonnegut was also a celebrated commencement address giver. He himself never graduated college, so his words to any class of graduating seniors always carried the delight, and gentle irony, of someone savouring an achievement he himself had not had occasion to savour on his own behalf.
           
Selected and introduced by fellow novelist and friend Dan Wakefield, the speeches in If This Isn't Nice, What Is? capture this side of Kurt Vonnegut for the first time in book form. There are nine speeches, seven given at colleges, one to the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, one on the occasion of Vonnegut receiving the Carl Sandburg Award. In each of these talks Vonnegut takes pains to find the few things worth saying and a conversational voice to say them in that isn’t heavy-handed or pretentious or glib, but funny and serious and joyful even if sometimes without seeming so.

About this title

About the Author:

Kurt Vonnegut is a unique voice in the American canon, a writer whose works are hard to categorise, often straddling the space between literature and science fiction, and filled with cutting satire and dark humor. Like Mark Twain before him, Vonnegut's reputation and impact on American writing and reading will continue to grow steadily and increase in relevance as new insights are made. Vonnegut was born in 1922 in Indianapolis, and studied at the University of Chicago and the University of Tennessee. In the Second World War, he became a German prisoner of war and was present during the bombing of Dresden. This experience provided inspiration for his most successful and influential novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut admired as much for his views and his "Vonnegutisms" as for his publications. He wrote extensively in many forms, including novels, short stories, essays, plays, articles, speeches, and correspondence, some of which was published posthumously.

A lifelong friend of Kurt Vonnegut's, Dan Wakefield both edited and wrote the Introduction to the bestselling collection of Vonnegut's personal correspondence, Kurt Vonnegut: Letters. In addition, Wakefield is the author of the memoir New York in the Fifties, which was made into a documentary film, as well as Returning: A Spiritual Journey. He created the NBC prime time series James at Fifteen and wrote the script for the movie based on his novel Going All The Way, starring Ben Affleck.

About this edition

• Publisher: Seven Stories Press,U.S.
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1609805917
• ISBN 13: 9781609805913
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144
• Editor: Dan Wakefield