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On Writing With Style
Narrator
Karen White
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Length
12 hours 1 minute
Language
English
The art and craft of writing by one of the few grandmasters of American literature, a bonanza for writers and readers written by Kurt Vonnegut's former student.
Here is an entirely new side of Kurt Vonnegut, Vonnegut as a teacher of writing. Of course he's given us glimpses before, with aphorisms and short essays and articles and in his speeches. But never before has an entire book been devoted to Kurt Vonnegut the teacher. Here is pretty much everything Vonnegut ever said or wrote having to do with the writing art and craft, altogether a healing, a nourishing expedition. McConnell has outfitted us for the journey, and in these thirty-seven chapters covers the waterfront of how one American writer brought himself to the pinnacle of the writing art, and we can all benefit as a result.
Kurt Vonnegut was one of the few grandmasters of American literature, whose novels continue to influence new generations about the ways in which our imaginations can help us to live. Few aspects of his contribution have not been plumbed—fourteen novels, collections of his speeches, his essays, his letters, his plays—so this fresh view of him, written by a former student, is a bonanza for writers and readers and Vonnegut fans everywhere.
Author, editor, and writing teacher Suzanne McConnell was a student of Kurt Vonnegut's at the Iowa Writers' Workshop during its heyday, the period from 1965-67, when Vonnegut-along with Nelson Algren and other notable authors-was in residence, and was finishing his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut and McConnell became friends, and stayed so for many years. She has published short memoirs of him in the Brooklyn Rail and the Writer's Digest, and led a panel at the 2014 AWP conference on Vonnegut's legacy, titled Vonnegut's Legacy: Writing about War and Other Debacles of the Human Condition. McConnell has taught writing at Hunter College for thirty years, and serves as the Fiction Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review. She lives in New York City and Wellfleet, Massachusetts, with her husband, the artist Gary Kuehn.
Kurt Vonnegut's black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as "a true artist" (The New York Times) with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, "one of the best living American writers." Vonnegut passed away in April 2007.
Karen White has been narrating audiobooks since 1999, with more than two hundred to her credit. Honored to be included in AudioFile's Best Voices and Speaking of Audiobooks's Best Romance Audio 2012 and 2013, she is also an Audie Award finalist and has earned multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards and Library Journal starred reviews. She currently lives with her family in Wilmington, North Carolina. Publishers Weekly says of Karen's narration of Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick, "Karen White delivers a stunning reading, her character interpretations are confident and well-rounded, and she forges a strong bond with the audience." Speaking of Audiobooks says, "Karen is one of my auto-buy narrators-if I think a book may interest me, her narration will sway me to give it a try."