Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction - Tapa blanda

Before the Golden Age of magazines drew to a close half a century ago, a young PR man at General Electric sold his first short story to one of the doomed publications. By the time he'd sold his third, he decided to quit GE and join the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner, and try to make a living at fifteen hundred dollars a pop. With four major magazines running five stories each week and smaller ones scouting as well, it was a seller's market, and Kurt Vonnegut was published regularly by The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Argosy and others. For this unusual collection, Vonnegut has selected twenty-four of his favourite stories never published before in book form and has written a new preface for the occasion. Vonnegut scholar Peter Reed, who unearthed the old publications, contributes an introduction. Now readers can relive the genesis of a master. Stories such as 'Any Reasonable Offer', 'The Powder Blue Dragon', 'Hal Irwin's Magic Lamp' and 'Lovers Anonymous' bring us to the beginning of a literary voice that is sure to last forever. Bagombo Snuff Box, the missing pieces of the master's oeuvre, is a ready made classic for Vonnegut fans new and old.

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied Biochemistry at Cornell University. During the Second world war he served in Europe and, as a prisoner of war in Germany, witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. He is the author of thirteen other novels, a previous collection of stories and three non-fiction books.