Friday, July 24, 2009

Unpublished Vonnegut Works to Get E-Book Treatment
By Dave Itzkoff in The New York Times.

In a twist that the master satirist would have appreciated, Kurt Vonnegut continues his posthumous career despite the apparent impediments to his productivity. On Wednesday, Random House said that its Delacorte Press imprint would release a series of 14 previously unpublished short stories by Mr. Vonnegut as single-story e-books. They will be released in advance of “Look at the Birdie,” a new hardcover collection of Mr. Vonnegut’s short fiction that Delacorte will release on Oct. 20. In a news release, the publisher said that the first story, “Hello Red,” would be available as an e-book on Aug. 25, and a second, “The Petrified Ants,” would be released on Sept. 29; the rest would be available on Oct. 20. In a statement, Nita Taublib, the editor in chief of Random House’s Bantam Dell unit, and Kerri Buckley, an editor there, said the collection was assembled by comparing annotated drafts of the stories provided by the Vonnegut estate. Ms. Buckley said in a statement that the book’s overall tone was “both cautionary and hopeful.”

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