On the next selected shorts, we're celebrating the centennial of Kurt Vonnegut.

It's all about the slaughterhouse five author who somehow managed to make a bleak dystopia

funny and a high school band teacher, a hero.

Helmholt stepped to the podium and raised his baton.

You are better than you think.

Join Dylan and Becky Ann Baker, Jordan Klepper, and me, Meg Wallitzer, as we celebrate a master.

Stay with us.

I'm Meg Wallitzer and you're listening to selected shorts, where our greatest actors transport

us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.

Novelist, short story writer and occasional graduation speaker Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007,

but he would have turned a hundred this year.

The sharp and wily cult figure, I guess he was really too big to be called a cult figure,

but he seemed like one.

Occupy is a singular place in the history of fiction.

Vonnegut was a pacifist who came to fame in the 1960s and whose best known work, Slaughterhouse

Five, was a reaction to his experiences during World War II.

He was a playful satirist and a sci-fi writer who wriggled his way into the embrace of the

mainstream.

And he had an idiosyncratic authorial voice that was at once effortless and impossible to

replicate.

Maybe a refan and you encountered Kat's cradle or breakfast of champions in high school.

Maybe Vonnegut's playful darkness helped you navigate the world just when it started

...