The Vonnegut Encyclopedia

Starred review from February 1, 2017
Leeds, longtime friend of Kurt Vonnegut and founding president of the Kurt Vonnegut Society, offers us a revised and expanded version of his 1995 compendium. This engaging new edition includes everything from the earlier work plus all of Vonnegut's more recent material. As in the earlier edition, Leeds makes generous use of original quotations from Vonnegut's work, accompanied by his own detailed, and very well informed, italicized commentary. A major departure from the arrangement of the previous edition is that line citations are now replaced by chapter citations. Therefore, this new publication will be of utility to all Vonnegut readers regardless of the edition, or format, of the Vonnegut work they use. Vonnegut enthusiasts will be delighted with Leeds' exhaustive, almost obsessive, treatment of the characters, places, events, and tantalizingly mysterious references for which Vonnegut's five-decade writing career is celebrated. In addition, Leeds gives us a very comprehensive system of cross-indexing. We learn, for example, that Henry Kissinger is on the passenger-cruise list in Galapagos (1985), then reappears as one of the caravan revelers in Hocus Pocus (1990). The only caveatone likely to concern only the most serious Vonnegut scholarsis that coverage is restricted towritings that Vonnegut personally approved for publication. Therefore, it does not include the many Vonnegut open drafts and refused manuscripts that are now available to researchers. Otherwise, this is a wonderful and beautifully designed reference source.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)