Wednesday, December 30

Wednesday at 2:30 pm. Today our subject is one literary hero, as remembered and celebrated by another literary hero. Kurt Vonnegut likely needs little introduction to the KPFK community, to politicos, to readers generally, as anybody who’s read anything has read Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, and of essays and speeches and short stories and more. Lucky for us, my guest is someone who’s known and befriended and boostered everybody who’s written, and is himself a novelist and memoirist and children’s book writer who was a friend to many, including the late Kurt Vonnegut. He is the writer Sidney Offit, author of the literary memoir, Friends, Writers and Other Countrymen, about which Michael Corda writes “It is possible that Sidney Offit knows more famous and interesting people than anyone else on earth, and what is more, has a funny and shrewdly observed story about each of them.... He is truly 20th Century New York City’s answer to Samuel Pepys.” On today's show I'm lucky to remember and celebrate the work of Kurt Vonnegut with his good friend, on the occasion of publication of previously unpublished short stories by Vonnegut in Look at the Birdie, with its introduction by Sidney Offit. This is one fun show. Thanks for listening.