Look at the Birdieevokes a world in which squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town Lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. In "Confido," a family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. In "Ed Luby's Key Club," a man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. In "Look at the Birdie," a quack psychiatrist turned "murder counsellor" concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. The stories are cautionary they also brim with his trademark humour.

Wry, ironic, satirical and poignantLook at the Birdiereflects the anxieties of the postwar era in which they were written and provides an insight into the development of Vonnegut's early style

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During WWII, as a prisoner of war in Germany, he witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspiredSlaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut's black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention inThe Sirens of Titanin 1959 and according toHarper's Magazine, established him as 'a true artist' withCat's Cradlein 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, 'one of the best living American writers'. Vonnegut died in April 2007.

LOOK AT THE BIRDIE is a collection of fourteen previously unpublished stories by the twentieth century master>