Kurt Vonnegut

A collection of short stories by the late Kurt Vonnegut will be released in November, Delacorte Press announced Friday. "Look at the Birdie" contains 14 stories by the author of "Slaughterhouse-Five." The publisher says it also plans to reissue 15 Vonnegut titles, a collection of his unpublished writings and a book of letters. Vonnegut died in April 2007.

In 1999, two years after the release of his final novel, “Timequake,” Kurt Vonnegut put out a small book called “God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian,” in which he imagined himself as the afterlife reporter for a New York radio station, using Jack Kevorkian's suicide machine to produce near-death experiences that would take him to a no man's land just outside the gates of heaven, where he would interview luminaries who had slipped the mortal coil....

In 1999, two years after the release of his final novel, “Timequake,” Kurt Vonnegut put out a small book called “God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian,” in which he imagined himself as the afterlife reporter for a New York radio station, using Jack Kevorkian's suicide machine to produce near-death experiences that would take him to a no man's land just outside the gates of heaven, where he would interview luminaries who had slipped the mortal coil....

And So It Goes Kurt Vonnegut: A Life Charles J. Shields Henry Holt: 544 pp., $30 It's dangerous to begin a biography with what amounts to an advertisement for oneself. "Someone else could cobble together a so-so version of your life just by mining what's stored in library boxes and electronic files. And it will happen soon, I think," Charles J. Shields writes in the introduction to "And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life," quoting a note he sent his then-potential-subject in summer 2006.

While Mortals Sleep Unpublished Short Fiction Kurt Vonnegut, foreword by Dave Eggers Delacorte: 272 pp., $27 It was in the 1950s that Kurt Vonnegut, then in his early 30s, quit his job as a publicity man for the research department of General Electric and committed himself to a freelance career. He soon published a first novel, 'Player Piano' (unsuccessful), and began cranking out short stories, scores of them, for the 'slicks' ? family magazines such as Collier's, Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan, markets that had helped support the careers of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Irwin Shaw, among others, and still, at that time, paid handsomely for fiction.

WHEN I heard that Kurt Vonnegut died, I immediately went to my bookshelf to search for my hardcover copy of "Hocus Pocus." No, it may not have been one of his greatest novels (I don't think I finished it), but just before it was published at the end of summer of 1990, Vonnegut had handed me a signed copy in which he had drawn one of his famous caricatures of himself -- unruly hair, bushy eyebrows, cigarette dangling from his mouth -- and dedicated it to "Good Old Gregory, My Co-Author."

And So It Goes Kurt Vonnegut: A Life Charles J. Shields Henry Holt: 544 pp., $30 It's dangerous to begin a biography with what amounts to an advertisement for oneself. "Someone else could cobble together a so-so version of your life just by mining what's stored in library boxes and electronic files. And it will happen soon, I think," Charles J. Shields writes in the introduction to "And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life," quoting a note he sent his then-potential-subject in summer 2006.

Newsday's New York office once surveyed the city from the 39th floor of a salmon-colored building on 3rd Avenue at 49th Street. At ground level, it was commonplace during the late 1980s to see three famous personalities who lived in the neighborhood. The great Katharine Hepburn would come and go from her Turtle Bay row house. The writer Dominick Dunne, Vanity Fair's red-hot chronicler of the rich and scandalous, seemed to prefer 3rd Avenue as a thoroughfare.

"The courtship dance of the blue-footed boobies, which Mrs. Onassis suddenly wanted to see so much in person, has not changed one iota in a million years. Neither have these birds learned to be afraid of anything. Neither have they shown the slightest inclination to give up on aviation and become submarines. As for the meaning of the courtship dance of the blue-footed boobies: The birds are huge molecules with bright blue feet and have no choice in the matter.

The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered. --D. H. Lawrence Kurt Vonnegut is a friend of mine. He was my teacher at the University of Iowa; he is my neighbor in Sagaponack, Long Island--it is a three-minute bike ride from my house to his. When I moved into my house, he gave me several plants--shrubs, actually; blue hydrangea and purple lilac. They are doing very well, largely because he told me how to care for them.

While Mortals Sleep Unpublished Short Fiction Kurt Vonnegut, foreword by Dave Eggers Delacorte: 272 pp., $27 It was in the 1950s that Kurt Vonnegut, then in his early 30s, quit his job as a publicity man for the research department of General Electric and committed himself to a freelance career. He soon published a first novel, 'Player Piano' (unsuccessful), and began cranking out short stories, scores of them, for the 'slicks' ? family magazines such as Collier's, Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan, markets that had helped support the careers of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Irwin Shaw, among others, and still, at that time, paid handsomely for fiction.

The rental house on Cape Cod where I've spent part of nearly every August since I was 9 years old has an amazing library. It's one of the appeals of the place: the opportunity to dig around in all those books, familiar and unfamiliar at once. They're not my books — and yet, after all this time, I know them so intimately that it almost feels as if they were. I discovered Georges Simenon in this house, one rainy afternoon when I was in my teens, and also P. G. Wodehouse, read Steinbeck's "Burning Bright" and "The Moon Is Down," worked my way through Bellow and Dickens and the collected writings of JFK. Many of these authors I've come to gather on my own shelves, but there is something about the randomness, the serendipity, of what a friend calls the guest house library, a way of simultaneously getting outside of and coming closer to oneself.

"The only way I can regain credit for my early work is to die," Kurt Vonnegut once said, sounding more amused than worried about it. Ever the realist, ever the stoic, ever the cynic, Vonnegut got how the lit game works. Reputations soar, tumble into the trash and rise mysteriously again. The good news is that quality tells in the end; and so here we are, 2 1/2 years after Vonnegut's death, celebrating new books and handsome reprints by a man who, by the time he passed on, had been a part of the liberal furniture for so long ("counter-culture icon," proclaimed the New York Times obituary)

Actress Parker Posey and authors Gay Talese and Naomi Wolf will be among those participating in a new line of audiobooks dedicated to famous 20th century books. Audible Inc. says the Audible Modern Vanguard will feature unabridged texts from Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut and other celebrated authors. Audible Inc. is a leading audiobook provider that Amazon.com purchased in 2008.

It's impossible to read Kurt Vonnegut's "Armageddon in Retrospect" without mixed emotions. On the one hand, there's the unexpected pleasure of encountering Vonnegut anew, a year after his death last April at age 84. On the other, the book can't help but remind us that he is no longer available in any living way.

For the doodling classes, nothing fills a day like a sex scandal. To misquote Kurt Vonnegut, God bless you, Eliot Spitzer! Stories about "Client 9" and his high-priced help (the ladies, not the lawyers) were a Page One staple, and cartoonists couldn't resist. Signe Wilkinson sympathized with the shamed, stoic spouse. Dan Wasserman let his ethical fantasies run wild. But Mike Lester's punch-line-drawing provided the keenest perspective.

"Bluebeard," Kurt Vonnegut's 16th book, is, the author tells us in his own jacket copy and in a prefatory note, "a novel, and a hoax autobiography at that . . . about a man who was in on the beginning of the first major art movement to originate in the United States, Abstract Expressionism, and whose pictures all fell apart due to an unfortunate choice of materials. He is Rabo Karabekian . . .

It's impossible to read Kurt Vonnegut's "Armageddon in Retrospect" without mixed emotions. On the one hand, there's the unexpected pleasure of encountering Vonnegut anew, a year after his death last April at age 84. On the other, the book can't help but remind us that he is no longer available in any living way.

Fiction 1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy ($14.95) 2. The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards ($14) 3. Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky ($14.95) 4. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai ($14) 5. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See ($13.95) Nonfiction 1. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion ($13.95) 2. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert ($15) 3. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls ($14) 4. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell ($15.99) 5. A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut ($13.