Welcome to the Monkey House

This short-story collection Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) incorporates almost completely Vonnegut’s 1961 “Canary in a Cathouse,” which appeared within a few months of Slaughterhouse-Five and capitalized upon that breakthrough novel and the enormous attention it suddenly brought.

Drawn from both specialized science fiction magazines and the big-circulation general magazines which Vonnegut had been one of the few science writers to sell, the collection includes some of his most accomplished work from 1950 to 1968. The title story may be his most famous—a diabolical government asserts control through compulsory technology removing orgasm from sex—but Vonnegut’s bitterness and wit, not in his earlier work as poisonous or unshielded as it later became, is well demonstrated.

Two early stories from Galaxy science fiction magazine and one from Fantasy & Science Fiction (the famous “Harrison Bergeron”) show Vonnegut’s careful command of a genre about which he was always ambivalent, stories like “More Stately Mansions” or “The Foster Portfolio” the confines and formula of a popular fiction of which he was always suspicious. Vonnegut’s affection for humanity and bewilderment as its corruption are manifest in these early works.

Several of these stories (those which appeared in Collier’s) were commissioned by Vonnegut’s Cornell classmate and great supporter Knox Burger, also born in 1922.

Contents

Preface

Where I live
Harrison Bergeron
Who am I this time?
Welcome to the Monkey House
Long walk to forever
The Foster portfolio
Miss Temptation
All the King´s horses
Tom Edison´s shaggy dog
New dictionary
Next door
More stately mansions
The Hyannis Port story
D.P.
Report on the Barnhouse Effect
The Euphio Question
Go back to your precious wife and son
Deer in the works
The lie
Unready to wear
The kid nobody could handle
The manned missile
Epicac
Adam
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow