Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction Book

"Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'?. . . Design your life like that Finnish carafe over there--clean, harmonious, alive with the cool, tart soul of truth in our time."

A short collection of early short stories by Vonnegut, with an introduction by the author himself, which is the highlight of the collection, especially since I listened to it in the car. I only listened to this now because it was the only free Vonnegut collection I could find from my library's subscription series, and I wanted to breathe in some of his comforting, bemused, humane cynicism. The collection is not his best work, but you do hear his voice in the stories and there's playfulness and reflection on American consumerist/war culture throughout.

Having just read George Saunders, I feel they are kindred spirits. And also with fellow (for a time) Chicagoan Ray Bradbury, though there are only two science fiction stories here. It's the warmth, that humane, aw-shucks tone they can affect at times. And Mark Twain, I often think of him when I read Vonnegut.

The introduction is about how he started to make money as a short story writer and was able to get out of working for General Electric. It includes reflections on a time when more people read short stories (though it seems steadily the same to me over the past decades, not as popular as novels, of course).

He shares his advice for writers, which is invaluable:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things: Reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them, in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Most of the stories are inferior to ones in later collections, but the best of them is "2 B R 0 2 B" which is a satire on population control.