Product Details
ISBN-10
1-58322-713-X
ISBN-13
978-1-58322-713-8
Publication Date
Sep 2005
Nb of pages
146
Illustrations 20
Illustration type
Illustrations, color
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Description
A Man Without a Country is Kurt Vonnegut’s hilariously funny and razor-sharp look at life (“If I die—God forbid—I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, ‘Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?”), art (“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.”), politics (“I asked former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton what he thought of our great victory over Iraq and he said, ‘Mohammed Ali versus Mr. Rogers.’”), and the condition of the soul of America today (“What has happened to us?”). Based on short essays and speeches composed over the last five years and plentifully illustrated with artwork by the author throughout, A Man Without a Country gives us Vonnegut both speaking out with indignation and writing tenderly to his fellow Americans, sometimes joking, at other times hopeless, always searching. Kurt Vonnegut is among the very few grandmasters of contemporary American letters, without whom the very term “American literature” would mean less than it does. His novels include Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five, among so many others. Projects with Seven Stories Press in recent years include God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian and, with Lee Stringer, Like Shaking Hands with God, a book about writing. His most recent novel is Timequake (1997).
The first major book to appear from Kurt Vonnegut in nearly a decade.
Click below to see some of Kurt's illustrations from A Man Without A Country.
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Reviews
Press Reviews
A Man without a Country
New York Times Book Review
Oct 9, 2005
...like his literary ancestor Mark Twain, his crankiness is good-humored and sharp-witted, and aimed at well-defended soft spots of hypocrisy and arrogance...
...On Nov. 11 - the holiday Vonnegut , who was a P.O.W. in Germany in World War II, has always preferred to think of as Armistice Day - he will turn 83, and since he has no expectation of a heavenly perch from which to look down and eavesdrop on his friends, it is best that we appreciate him while he's still around. ''A Man Without a Country'' is a fine place to start, especially since it can lead us back to ''Mother Night'' and ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' and ''The Sirens of Titan'' and the stories collected in ''Bagombo Snuff Box.'' In other words, it's like sitting down on the couch for a long chat with an old friend.
- A. O. Scott
A Man without a Country
The Los Angeles Times
Sep 10, 2005
Although "A Man Without a Country" has its roots in those essays and public statements, it is, at heart, a different type of project, fuller, more integrated, not a collection of loose ends so much as a testament. "Kurt is very engaged with the history of the moment," says Dan Simon, publisher of New York's Seven Stories Press, which is issuing the book. "He has passionate feelings about being alive today."
Certainly, "A Man Without a Country" is as overtly political a book as Vonnegut has written, a lament for an America that is no longer, in which, the author argues, social justice has been subsumed by war and fear. At the same time, it may be as close as Vonnegut ever comes to a memoir, with its mix of autobiography and social commentary, its reflections on topics as varied as our fossil fuel addiction and longtime heroes like Twain and labor and political leader Eugene V. Debs. In the end, Simon suggests, the best way to think of it may be as "a Tralfamadorian novel," a reference to "Slaughterhouse-Five," part of which takes place on a planet where books are written "in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars.... Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message — describing a situation, a scene.... There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."
- David L. Ulin
A Man without a Country
Jerusalem Post
Oct 21, 2005
...A Man Without a Country feels a lot like a 21st-century version of The Little Prince, written for adults by a chain-smoking New Yorker with a habit of goofing off....
No other American humorist see-saws from gravity to gobbledygook this effectively, in part because for Vonnegut the two are always connected. Life for him is deadly serious, but the best way to deal with fear is to laugh in its face.
A Man Without a Country aptly plays this scenario out in twelve short riffs on topics as diverse as sex and humanism. Each chapter arrives preceded by a silk-screen image of some aphorism by Vonnegut.
"Evolution is so creative," says one. "That is how we got giraffes." Thanks to these gnomic non-sequiturs, A Man Without a Country feels a lot like a 21st-century version of The Little Prince, written for adults by a chain-smoking New Yorker with a habit of goofing off.
- John Freeman
A Man without a Country
Harper's Magazine
Oct 5, 2005
...The novelist/pacifist/socialist/humanist who has smoked unfiltered Pall Malls since he was twelve is suing the tobacco company that makes them because, "for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am now eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."
"I used to be funny," Kurt Vonnegut informs us in A Man Without a Country (Seven Stories, $23.95), "and perhaps I'm not anymore." This last bit is untrue, of course. In these essays from the pages of the radical biweekly In These Times, he is very funny as often as he wants to be. For instance: "My wife is by far the oldest person I ever slept with." And if you don't smile for at least a week at the friendly notion of the corner mailbox as a "giant blue bullfrog," you ought to have your license revoked.
But, like Mark Twain, even when he's funny he's depressed. His has always been a weird jujitsu that throws us for a brilliant loop. As much as he would like to chat about semicolons, paper clips, giraffes, Vesuvius, and the Sermon on the Mount—"If Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being, I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake"—his own country has driven him to furious despair with its globocop belligerence, its contempt for civil liberties, and its holy war on the poor: "Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club...and kiss my ass!" The novelist/pacifist/socialist/humanist who has smoked unfiltered Pall Malls since he was twelve is suing the tobacco company that makes them because, "for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am now eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."
- John Leonard
Experts
During the darkest years of the Bush administration, these essays. . . were guide and serum to anyone with a feeling that pretty much everyone had lost their minds.
-Dave Eggers
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