Book description
Look at the Birdie evokes a world in which squabbling couples,
high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town Lotharios
struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and
unprecedented affluence. In "Confido," a family learns the
downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention.
In "Ed Luby's Key Club," a man finds himself in a Kafkaesque
world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who
calls the shots in an upstate New York town. In "Look at the
Birdie," a quack psychiatrist turned "murder
counsellor" concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid
patients. The stories are cautionary they also brim with his trademark humour.
Wry, ironic, satirical and poignant Look at the Birdie
reflects the anxieties of the postwar era in which they were
written and provides an insight into the development of Vonnegut's
early style
Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied
biochemistry at Cornell University. During WWII, as a prisoner of war in
Germany, he witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an
experience which inspired
Slaughterhouse Five
. Vonnegut's black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination
first captured America's attention in
The Sirens of Titan
in 1959 and according to
Harper's Magazine
, established him as 'a true artist' with
Cat's Cradle
in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, 'one of the best living
American writers'. Vonnegut died in April 2007.
