title: Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction
author:  Kurt Vonnegut 
description: This collection of unpublished fiction sheds light on Vonnegut's early writing, but fails to measure up to the rest of his formidable oeuvre. The stories are brief, vividly imagined and sometimes carry a science-fictional twist with a moral (of sorts), not unlike Harrison Bergeron. In Confido, for instance, an inventor manufactures a device that whispers to its users everything they want to hear, with special emphasis on their worst desires and suspicions, while the title story describes an interaction at a bar between a disgruntled man and a self-styled murder counselor who has come up with an ingenious method for killing people. Sidney Offit, Vonnegut's longtime friend, notes in an introduction that it's possible these stories went unpublished because they didn't satisfy the author. To be sure, they lack the polish and humor of the author's best-known work. Nevertheless, for devotees, they provide an instructive view of Vonnegut's talent in the making. <i>(Nov.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: > > AMERICAS GREATEST SATIRIST  
  > KURT VONNEGUT IS …
  
  > ![](images/00005.jpg)
  
  > > > “UNIQUE … one of the writers who map our landscapes for us, who give
  > names to the places we know best.”
  
  > > > —DORIS LESSING  
  >  The New York Times Book Review
  
  > > > “A ZANY BUT MORAL MAD SCIENTIST at the controls of a literary time
  > machine … Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon
  > compounded into one writer.”
  
  > > > —Time
  
  > > > “A BLACK-HUMORIST, FANTASIST, AND SATIRIST, a man disposed to deep and
  > comic reflection on the human dilemma.”
  
  > > > —Life
  
  > > > “OUR FINEST BLACK-HUMORIST…. We laugh in self-defense.”
  
  > > > —The Atlantic Monthly
  
  > > > “AN UNIMITATIVE AND INIMITABLE SOCIAL SATIRIST.”
  
  > > > —Harper’s Magazine
  
  > > > “ONE OF THE FEW CONTEMPORARY WRITERS who can make you laugh despite the
  > circumstances—or rather, because of them.”
  
  > > > —The Atlanta Journal & Constitution
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  > BOOKS BY KURT VONNEGUT
  
  > Bluebeard  
  > Breakfast of Champions  
  > Cat’s Cra