Product Description

Paul Theroux: Dog Days (30 min)
It was a time of excessive heat, unwholesome influences – and an overpowering lust for the Chinese servant girl.
Theroux is a novelist, short story and travel writer. His more than two dozen books include Riding the Iron Rooster and Mosquito Coast.
DOG DAYS, by Paul Theroux, originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (November, 1971) ©1971 Playboy.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Fortitude (30 min)
She was a lovely old lady – at least what was left of her – and she had the best set of sweetbreads that money could buy.
Vonnegut is the bestselling author of many works, including Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions and, most recently, Hocus Pocus.
FORTITUDE, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (September, 1968) ©1968 Playboy.
Ursula K. Le Guin: Unlocking the Air (28 min)
This is history. Soldiers stand in a row before the palace, their muskets ready. Stefana is ready too.
Le Guin is best known for her fantasy and science fiction, including The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea trilogy, but she has also published poetry, plays, and several children's books.
UNLOCKING THE AIR, by Ursula K. Le Guin, originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (December, 1990) ©1990 Playboy.
Lawrence Sanders: The Further Adventures of Chauncey Alcock (32 min)
In which our hero is called upon to exhibit his manhood and does so courageously, to the gratification of new friends and the heartfelt approbation of fellow citizens.
Sanders is the author of many bestselling thrillers, including the Deadly Sin series (The First Deadly Sin...) and the Commandment series (The Third Commandment...).
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF CHAUNCEY ALCOCK, by Lawrence Sanders, originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (December, 1972) ©1972 Playboy.
Andre Dubus: Anna (56 min)
They knocked off the drugstore because they thought that money would change their lives. It did – but not enough.
Dubus taught for eighteen years at Bradford College in Massachusetts before an automobile accident forced his retirement. Many of his short stories are set in that area.
ANNA, by Andre Dubus, originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (June, 1981) ©1981 Playboy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6570499 in Books
• Published on: 1997-07-01
• Released on: 1997-07-01
• Formats: Audiobook, Unabridged
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 2
• Binding: Audio Cassette

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Listeners are in for a treat as a masterful cast animates many of Vonnegut's finest short pieces. Vonnegut colors his oft-wondrous works with memorable characters, fantastic realities, pitch-perfect dialogue and heapings of satire and humor—a tall order for any audio actor. But this group of narrators are veterans of screen and stage, each with a unique voice as malleable as clay. It's hard to find fault with this production. Occasionally, Tucci and Irwin oversoften their voices, and listeners may find themselves reaching for the volume. Otherwise, there are very few blemishes. Baker is outstanding in "All the King's Horses" and "The Hyannis Port Story." Strathairn shines on "Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog" and "The Lie." Tucci handles with ease the predominantly male pieces "Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son" and "Manned Missiles." Irwin inhabits every character. The robust Roberts is both commanding and wry. Given the fertile material and the collective talent of the cast, listeners should expect nothing less than excellence here. They won't be disappointed. Available in paperback from Dell. (June)
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From the Publisher
Welcome To The Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnueguts shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.

From the Inside Flap
This collection of Vonnegut's short masterpieces share his audacious sense of humor and extraordinary creative vision.

Customer Reviews

As essential as the novels
I'm not a huge fan of short story collections since I'd much rather sit through a single story throughout all those pages instead of a series of tales that at best tend to be hit or miss and wildly inconsistent. However there are some writers that I will acknowledge are masters of the form, Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury and of course Kurt Vonnegut (that's not even counting the "classic" short story masters who I haven't read) who's novels sometimes come across as longish short stories anyway. Most of these stories were written early in his career, in the fifties or sixties and it looks like someone actually made an attempt to sequence them instead of just dumping them in chronoloogical order, thus there's a bit of a procession as you move along, finally ending with the darkly hopeful 'Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow". Along the way you'll find that the quality is quite high and many of these are very much vintage Vonnegut. He mixes around with genres and so SF exercises such as "Harrison Bergeron" and "Welcome to the Monkey House" (classics both) sit comfortably next to more typical stories such as "Manned Missiles" (which gets my vote for most effective story in the collection and surprised me the most). There aren't really any clunkers here, some are simpler than others and will pass you by without much impact, but the majority all have some moment or theme to recommend them as keepers and give you something to think about long after you've finished them. Sure, most of the stories were written in a different time but regardless of the SF or the Cold War backdrop or whatever, these are essentially timeless and deserved to be read again and again.

bite-sized chunks
If you don't already know Kurt Vonnegut's work, this may be the best introduction to it -- especially considering that short stories are the art form that Vonnegut started out with, where he developed his craft.

And if you already know Vonnegut but don't know this book, then think of this as the author in delicious bit-sized chunks.

But read the book!

I would not say that Welcome to the Monkey House is Vonnegut's best book -- in fact, it may not even be in the top five by my calculations -- but it is the one book of his I would keep if I had to give all the other away, simply because of the diversity of the stories he tells and the simple writing skill they illustrate.

And I might argue that the best single STORY Vonnegut ever wrote is "Harrison Bergeron" the riveting and still-relevant tale about human nature that effects me as much today as it did when I first read it 20 years ago. Vonnegut without a doubt proves with this story that all writers are not created equal.

An amazing collection of short stories
Having never read Vonnegut before, I wasn't sure what to expect from this book. The title led me to expect some degree of science fiction. What I found was a collection of rich, wonderfully written stories about a wide assortment of subjects. Vonnegut is a great writer, pure and simple. Many of the stories dealt with the future and the state of society, and Vonnegut struck me as having a somewhat cynical yet witty view of the subject. I found the themes of his stories to be somewhat akin to my own fears of life as we will some day know it, in a world where the government attempts to create utopia on earth. Two of the more memorable stories found in these pages are "Harrison Bergeron" and "Welcome to the Monkey House." In the first story, we find the type of society that I fear the most, a socialist republic where all people are required to be equal; those who possess intelligence and pose the danger of actually thinking are controlled by implants which forcefully disallow any thought from entering their minds. In the latter, we find a Malthusian world of overpopulation where everyone takes pills to numb the lower halves of their bodies and people are encouraged to come to Federal Ethical Suicide Parlors and voluntarily remove themselves from the crowded world. Other stories deal with massive overpopulation troubles.

On the other hand, we find more simplistic stories in which Vonnegut conveys individuals in a deep, touching light, striking great chords of sympathy in this reader's mind. A woman who is obsessed with redecorating the houses of her neighbors yet cannot afford to buy decent furniture for her own house; a young woman who comes to a strange town, captivates everyone with her beauty, is criticized and publicly humiliated by a young man for being the kind of girl he could never win the heart of, and is richly shown to be an innocent, lonely soul; a teen who acts horribly because he has never had a real family but is saved from a life of crime by a teacher who makes the grand effort to save the boy--these are some of the many subjects dealt with by the author. There is even a heartfelt story about a young Russian and young American who are killed in space but who inspire understanding and détente between the two superpowers by bringing home the point that they were both young men with families who loved them and who had no desire for anything but peace--written during the height of the Cold War, that story really stood out to me.

All of the stories are not eminently satisfying to me, but the lion's share of them are; a couple of stories seemed to have been written for no other reason but to make the author some money, which is okay (especially since Vonnegut introduces the stories by saying he wrote them in order to finance his novel-writing endeavors). I may have been less than satisfied by a couple of stories, but even the worst of the lot was written wonderfully and obviously with much care, and I daresay that few writers could do better on their best day than Vonnegut does on his worst. Sometimes, as one ages, one fears that he will eventually have read all of the best books in the world, but then one discovers an author such as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and it is one of the best and most exciting things that can happen to that person.