Kurt Vonnegut was my favorite author when I was a young man and a great inspiration. My favorites were "Sirens of Titan", "Cat's Cradle" and "Player Piano".

What were yours?

He also inspired me to smoke Pall Mall straights for my first few years as a smoker. If you drew on them too fast they'd burn a hole in your lip.

Yeah my money was on lung cancer. Either way he was brilliant voice with a bleak sense of humor that definitely resonated with me. My favorite was Breakfast of Champions, I nearly died laughing the first time I read it.

kyle

Sirens of Titan, but it's hard to pick a favorite. Discover Magazine this month has a piece on Titan--Earth's shadowy double--and I was using it to talk about Sirens of Titan with someone a couple weekends ago, and it wasn't working.

One year, for a Banned Books Week event at the New York State Library, I read a section of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Perhaps because I wanted to make even all my good fellow liberals who showed up for it squirm a bit, I read the bit about Eliot being lectured by his father while Wliot is absently unrolling one of his own public hairs to the length of something like two feet, and seeming oddly proud of it.

b!X,
That's right.. I'd forgotten. Elliot's dad... wasn't he some anti-porno politicial who had defined ponography as being the display of bodily hair?

Last time I felt this way was when I heard Dr. Thompson had left us. We've lost a truly unique and necessary American voice in Kurt Vonnegut.
As far as favorites, I'd have to choose "Sirens of Titan" or "Cat's Cradle". In truth I enjoyed all his works. Even his so-called "lesser" or "secondary" works never failed to leave me feeling somehow better, despite illustrating just how shitty the world can be.
He's also one of the only "celeberities" I think would have been fun to bullshit with over a beer.
This news makes todays grey rainy sky o.k. with me.

Oh, favorite short story, "The Big Space Fuck" a science fiction fable about an environmentally ruined and highly litigious America. Classic Black Comedy that appeared in the Harlan Ellison edited anthology "Dangerous Visions". Check it out if you get the chance.

Dave, indeed. He had the definition enshrined in what was called, of course, the Rosewater Law.