by Kurt Vonnegut
I like short stories just fine, thank you. I like to read them and (gasp!) I like to write them. My favorite Stephen King story, for example, isn’t one of his famed novels; it’s a haunting little gem called “The Last Rung on the Ladder,” which can be found in the King collection Night Shift. But short stories have an obvious downside: They are often too short. Too … slight. It’s like having one bite of juicy shrimp and then being told you can’t have any more.
Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite writers. The stories in Monkey are from his early years (1950s-1960s), so some of them feel dated, and others feel like the product of a young, unpolished writer. But none of them are dull and many of them are thought-provoking. They are the literary equivalent of a TV show of that same era, The Twilight Zone – stories with a moral, often humorous, and frequently laced with Vonnegut’s favorite genre, science fiction.
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