September 22
While reading through Kurt Vonnegut’s papers in the Lilly Library, at Indiana University, as they worked on the first comprehensive edition of his short fiction, Vonnegut’s friend Dan Wakefield and Jerome Klinkowitz, a scholar of Vonnegut’s work, came across five previously unpublished stories.
In anticipation of publishing Kurt Vonnegut’s Complete Stories (available for order today!), we’ve been rolling out some of those tales that never found their way into print. The Atlantic got “The Drone King,” which they published along with an incredible animated version of the story. Another, “Requiem for Zeitgeist” will be published tomorrow on the website of The Nation.
And here’s "And on Your Left," a never before published Vonnegut story exclusively for the Seven Stories blog. It tells the tale of hard scientists forced into a life of show biz, and how they conspire to get back to their work. We hope you enjoy!
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November 11
An excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without a Country:
The most I can give you to cling to is a poor thing, actually. Not much better than nothing, and maybe it’s a little worse than nothing. It is the idea of a truly modern hero. It is the bare bones of the life of Ignaz Semmelweis, my hero.
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November 09
“If there is no struggle there is no progress. . . . This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.”
—Frederick Douglass
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November 07
Does America deserve to survive?
That's the question William Faulkner asked himself after the 1955 murder of Emmitt Till, and that's the question
Ariel Dorfman has found himself wondering in 2016, during his pilgrimage to Faulkner's hometown of Oxford, Mississippi.
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