Welcome to the Monkey House
1950
- american science fiction
- short stories, american
- american short stories
- fiction
- science fiction, american
- short stories
- american fiction (fictional works by one author)
- fiction, short stories (single author)
- american literature
- science fiction
The story
Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, these superb stories share Vonnegut’s audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision. Includes the following stories: “Where I Live” “Harrison Bergeron” “Who Am I This Time?” “Welcome to the Monkey House” “Long Walk to Forever” “The Foster Portfolio” “Miss Temptation” “All the King’s Horses” “Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog” “New Dictionary” “Next Door” “More Stately Mansions” “The Hyannis Port Story” “D.P.” “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” “The Euphio Question” “Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son” “Deer in the Works” “The Lie” “Unready to Wear” “The Kid Nobody Could Handle” “The Manned Missiles” “Epicac” “Adam” “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” From randomhouse.com
What it’s like
Brisk, dry and sharp-edged, with the crisp deadpan voice of mid-century American magazine fiction: short scenes, quick cuts from comedy to cold dread, and a narrator who reports absurd futures with a straight face. The mood is wry and unsentimental, the kind of brainy irreverence that makes a rainy-afternoon armchair read feel like a conversation with a very funny skeptic. Prose is plain and clean, rarely lush, with suburban kitchens, factory towns, television studios and rocket launch pads rendered in quick, flat strokes rather than rich description. Pacing is brisk and varied; most pieces run only a few pages, so the book suits dipping in and out, reading one story while waiting for the kettle or on a long-haul flight. Emotional registers shift from tender to bleak within a single collection, and the recurring figures are ordinary people caught between their appetites and the machinery of the age: a lonely inventor, a bored housewife, a clerk who wants to be left alone. Violence is occasional and mostly off-page or swift, with some stories ending in death or ruin, and there is a handful of sexual content that is brief and non-explicit. Overall it is more bitter and cutting than cozy. It is for readers who enjoy satirical science fiction, dark humor and sharp mid-century prose, and who want stories that are clever and quick rather than immersive.
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