Welcome to the Monkey House ; Palm Sunday: an Autobiographical Collage

This short-story collection Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) incorporates almost completely Vonnegut’s 1961 “Canary in a Cathouse,” which appeared within a few months of Slaughterhouse-Five and capitalized upon that breakthrough novel and the enormous attention it suddenly brought.Drawn from both specialized science fiction magazines and the big-circulation general magazines which Vonnegut had been one of the few science writers to sell, the collection includes some of his most accomplished work from 1950 to 1968. The title story may be his most famous—a diabolical government asserts control through compulsory technology removing orgasm from sex—but Vonnegut’s bitterness and wit, not in his earlier work as poisonous or unshielded as it later became, is well demonstrated.