The 1999 Salon interview with Kurt Vonnegut

Excerpt and Link below:

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.