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"Assuming the Position" by Rick Whitaker
A onetime hustler takes a long, hard look at the Life.
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[10/08/99]

Ivory Tower
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My momentous monologue turns to dust under the scrutiny of a well-prepared student.
By David Alford
[10/08/99]

Biography as screenplay
Edmund Morris has conceived the life of Ronald Reagan as a movie. And it's a bomb.
By Charles Kaiser
[10/07/99]

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"Walkin' the Dog" by Walter Mosley
The stories in this new collection flirt dangerously with agitprop but wind up delivering a cumulative shock.
By Jesse Berrett
[10/07/99]

The genius of Danzig
Günter Grass' Nobel Prize honors the stalwart leftist who rebuilt the German novel on the literary ruins of the Third Reich.
By Gavin McNett
[10/07/99]

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Also today Thin gruel for Vonnegut fans Alan Rudolph's film of "Breakfast of Champions" has no idea what draws fans to Father Kurt: his intelligent anti- intellectualism.

I recently met Vonnegut on a blustery day in Manhattan to talk about these stories. We also discussed the loneliness of the writer's life, television, politics and life at the end of the 20th century. Vonnegut, who remembers the Depression and served in World War II, turns 78 next month. He smoked unfiltered Pall Malls throughout the interview. When he laughs, which he does frequently, he squeezes his face up horizontally in the wide-open grin of the Cheshire Cat. He is always ready to pounce with a joke, and the loudest laugh, like the last, is always his.

Is this really it? The last Vonnegut book?

I have one more I'm shopping around, but publishers have found the subject rather dated, and so I guess this probably is my last book. What I've been shopping around is the story of my love affair with O.J. Simpson. [Laughs.]

Tough sell.

Yes, most people have forgotten who he is. And it was so long ago. It was in Buffalo, and I went to the dressing room after the game. I asked him to autograph my football, but I didn't realize that was code.

For?

Well ... the beginning of a love affair. But I felt used. Anyway, nobody's interested, so please, let's go on.

OK, OK. Your introduction to the new collection gives a quick career rundown. Did it make you nostalgic to be writing it for your last published book?

I wanted to repair every story, because the premise of each story was pretty good, and I wanted to do more with it now. But no -- it is archaeology, and the artifact is from the past. I was nostalgic just for the sake of future generations. It was very easy to get started as a writer during the golden age of magazines, before TV. The Saturday Evening Post published five stories every week; Collier's published five stories every week; Cosmopolitan, which is a sex manual now, published five stories a month; and the country was short-story-crazy. "Hey, did you see the short story in Collier's last week?" "No, but I heard about it and I want to read it." A woman, an English major, pregnant with a baby to pay for, could sit down in the kitchen late at night and write a love story and send it off to the Ladies' Home Journal or Cosmo or whatever, and pay for the baby, because the magazines were really hungry for stories.

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