Kurt Vonnegut Novels 1976-1985

About this book

Slapstick (1976), the memoirs of Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, a hundred-year-old former president of the United States and the promulgator of an ingenious national program to stamp out “American loneliness.” By giving every citizen a new middle name, President Swain, himself assigned to the computer-generated Daffodil clan, also gives them a numberless network of concerned “relatives”—a taste of the familial bliss that Swain once enjoyed with his twin sister, Eliza, his soulmate and missing half, now dead beneath an avalanche on Mars. Jailbird (1979) is a political memoir of a less fantastic sort, chronicling the misadventures of Walter F. Starbuck, a once-idealistic government functionary who, through no wrongdoing of his own, has become embroiled in every major national scandal from Sacco and Vanzetti to Watergate. Deadeye Dick (1982) is the story of a talentless playwright’s lifelong struggle to atone for the accidental crimes of his youth, the foolishness of his father, and the sins of his country. And in Galápagos (1985), a favorite of the author’s among his books, a ghost from the future reveals how and why a million years ago—during the global ecological disaster of 1986—humankind abandoned the land for the sea and embarked upon an unlikely evolution. The volume is rounded out with an assortment of Vonnegut rarities: speeches, essays, and commentary that touch upon the themes and particulars of these novels.

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