Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction
    Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction
    Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction
    Audiobook7 hours

    Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction

    Written by Kurt Vonnegut

    Narrated by Christopher Evan Welch, Norman Dietz, Barbara Rosenblat and

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Look at the Birdie is a collection of fourteen short stories from one of the most original writers in American fiction. This series of perfectly rendered vignettes, never before published in Kurt Vonnegut's lifetime, reveals a warm, wise, and funny portrait of life in post-World War II America-a world where squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. Featuring a Foreword by author and longtime Vonnegut confidant Sidney Offit, Look at the Birdie is an unexpected gift for readers who thought that Vonnegut's voice had been stilled forever-and serves as a terrific introduction to his short fiction for anyone who has yet to experience his genius.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateOct 20, 2009
    ISBN9781440763342
    Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction
    Author

    Kurt Vonnegut

    Kurt Vonnegut was a master of contemporary American Literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Siren's of Titan in 1959 and established him as ""a true artist"" with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene has declared, ""one of the best living American writers.""

    More audiobooks from Kurt Vonnegut

    Related to Look at the Birdie

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Shelf Life

      Dec 2, 2021

      Shelf Life
      4 min read

    • Article

      Secret Sex Lives In Victorian England

      Jan 26, 2023

      NEW YEAR, NEW LIFE. As we march under cover of bravado into 2023, the first piece of good news is an impressive debut novel whose achievement largely matches its ambition. The New Life by Tom Crewe, an editor at the London Review of Books, is a story

      6 min read

    • Article

      Vonnegut Inc.

      Nov 25, 2020

      Vonnegut Inc.
      8 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Scott, Bucak, Zeh, Steinberg, and More

      Aug 20, 2019

      An intriguing near-future dystopian thriller, two innovative short story collections, and a remarkable portrait of Britain at its Brexit inflection point. The post Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Scott, Bucak, Zeh, Steinberg, and More appeared firs

      5 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Mar 6, 2023

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      Chronicling Life’s White Machine

      Jul 31, 2017

      It is not hard to mentally recast writers as social media types: Knausgaard, the maximalist oversharer; Lerner, the pomo ironic; Cusk, the reticent philosopher; Heti, the more traditional diarist.   The post Chronicling Life’s White Machine appeared

      7 min read

    • Article

      Write What You Know? Identity Politics and Fiction

      Oct 11, 2017

      If it weren’t so illustrative of the loaded identitarian schism at the heart of leftist politics, it would make for the perfect right-wing conspiracy: not only have well-meaning liberals become too PC, they are now roundly dismissed as blinkered by t

      14 min read

    • Article

      Fiction

      Apr 3, 2024

      Fiction
      9 min read

    • Article

      Snaps, Crackles And Pop Art

      Mar 30, 2023

      WRITING ABOUT MUSIC, as the comedian Martin Mull put it, is like dancing about architecture. Novelists who try their hand at the story-about-a-band genre rarely produce their best goods, even when the results are interesting (Don DeLillo’s Great Jone

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Look at the Birdie

    4/5

    15 ratings11 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      There is usually a good reason that an author's work goes unpublished.
      While the expected flaws are present in these raw, early short stories, the promise and the potential of the writer Vonnegut would become shines through. Not a book to start with if you've never read him before, but certainly a must-read for aficionados.
    • 2/5
      It is hard for me to believe that anything Kurt Vonnegut wrote could have somehow remained unpublished after all this time. I have a feeling that his remaining family kind of uses his work as a sort of bank account dipped in time-release. Every time they need a significant chuck of cash, they must just dip into what I imagine to be a giant solid pewter trunk and pull out some of ol' Uncle Kurt's gold.Because, let's face it, the man can do no wrong. These stories must not have been his favorites. That part is evident. They lack the luster that his other works carried. Collectively, these stories are like a tarnished pocket watch you find in your grandfather's closet when you're cleaning his house out after he dies. It doesn't keep time and it's got something sticky on it, but, upon further investigation, you eventually find out that he took it from a Nazi soldier he strangled to death with his bare hands. It isn't a good watch, but it's incredible all the same.I was surprised by some of the stuff I found in this book. Some stories, like the last one (which, by the way, was so unexpectedly powerful that it caused me to stop breathing once I fully realized what that old bastard had done), were quite unusual for Vonnegut. Instead of going for a humorous take, he set you up for one then followed up with the literary equivalent of a dead baby. It wasn't his best, but it wasn't intended to be. God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut. Come see us again sometime.
    • 4/5
      Certainly not the best Vonnegut. However, all a nice read with that Vonnegut style of looking at the world.
    • 4/5
      This was another good collection of short stories by Kurt Vonnegut. He managed to surprise me with many of them, not only holding my attention and entertaining me, but providing meaning and closure in nearly all of his tales. If you're a Vonnegut fan, you really should read this collection.4.25 stars.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this collection from earlier in his career. Most of these lack the edge of some of his later works, but I enjoyed the way the stories were crafted and the simple humanity of them. I particularly enjoyed A Song for Selma and King and Queen of the Universe and I think it was that humanity that appealed to me.
    • 5/5
      The second 'we-swear-it's-the-last' collection of short stories from one of the greatest american writer of the XX c. Still unique, still enchanting.... Miss you Kurt!
    • 3/5
      I was a little disappointed with this book as it lacks all the characteristics that readers come to expect of a Vonnegut work. Furthermore, the foreword of any work by Vonnegut was just as entertaining as the stories themselves, but this one came up short. The forewords made sense of the whole thing. I remember reading the foreword of Breakfast of Champions and reading about how soldiers fighting during World War I head the silence on the 11 day of the 11 month with the truce and swore that it was the voice of God. This is just a collection of short stories from a novice writer trying to find his voice. Armageddon in Retrospect was the last book Vonnegut was working on before his death. In that book, I could tell that he wanted to rework certain stories within it. There are in fact two stories in that work that are identical with exception to the ending. It was a magnificent final work, Birdie is probably the worst. It probably shouldn't have been put out at all with the exception pleasing hard core Vonnegut fans. With the exception of Candido, all of the stories are very bland and predictable. They lack the characteristics of the Vonnegut everyone knows.
    • 4/5
      Having not read any Vonnegut in many years, it was a pleasure to read these stories. Not all of them hit the high mark that I came to expect from the author, but it was fun to get back into his unique way of looking at things. He was great at building absurdity upon absurdity. Not sure how much younger readers are into Vonnegut but they should definitely read his classics.
    • 4/5
      I read "Petrified ants" before reading this collection. I feel "Petrified ants" is the weakest of the stories. The others are great vignettes, which could perhaps have been made into short novels. Enjoyable nonetheless.
    • 4/5
      I'm so glad someone decided to put all these "lost" stories in this fine collection. Hall of Mirrors and the title story; Look at the Birdie were probably my two favorite with Petrified Ants being my least. I have to admit though that Petrified Ants was not what I expected. I enjoed the story of the ants more than I did the characters in the same story. All in all a good read for some previously unpublished stories.
    • 4/5
      Some decent Vonnegut stories, but nothing astounding. I enjoyed reading several, but others I could not get into at all. Though, a mixed bag of Vonnegut is better than no Vonnegut at all.