KURT VONNEGUT "Fates Worse Than Death" SIGNED 1ST with CARICATURE SELF-PORTRAIT

Description: G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1991. First Edition, First Printing (Complete number line including "1"). Book Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine in archival protective cover. SIGNED and dated (as well as his age 75 1/2) on the front free endpaper by Kurt Vonnegut. Additionally, Vonnegut has drawn a caricature self-portrait in profile on the page; his signature is within the full-page drawing. Kurt Vonnegut's autobiographical collection of essays that fuse memory and imagination to confront death and things that are considered worse. In the introduction to the book, he acknowledges the book is similar to an earlier book, Palm Sunday. In it he discusses his attempted suicide. This book includes a "humanist requiem" that Vonnegut wrote as a reaction to the Roman Catholic Requiem, which he'd heard in Andrew Lloyd Webber's setting & whose text he found offensive. His own text was then set as a "Cosmos Cantata" by the composer Seymour Barab, of whom he said, "Barab's music is full of magic. He proved to an atheist that God exists. What an honor to have worked with him." The ending of this text is: "Let not eternal light disturb our sleep, O Cosmos, for Thou art merciful. Deliver me, O Cosmos, from everlasting wakefulness. On that dread day when the heavens & earth shall quake, when we shall dissolve the world into glowing ashes in the name of gods unknowable, I am seized with trembling & I am afraid until that day of reckoning shall arrive. Hence I pray, Deliver me, O Cosmos, from everlasting wakefulness on that day of wrath, calamity & misery. Rest grant us, O Cosmos, & let not light perpetual disturb our sleep.

Price: 995 USD

Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts

End Time: 2024-12-13T20:59:57.000Z

Shipping Cost: 16.95 USD