Kurt Vonnegut: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations

<b>One of the great American iconoclasts holds forth on politics, war, books and writers, and his personal life in a series of conversations</b>&mdash;<b>including his last published interview. <br></b><br>During his long career Kurt Vonnegut won international praise for his novels, plays, and essays. In this new anthology of conversations with Vonnegut&mdash;which collects interviews from throughout his career&mdash;we learn much about what drove Vonnegut to write and how he viewed his work at the end.<br><b>From Kurt Vonnegut's Last Interview</b><br><b>Is there another book in you, by chance?</b><br>No. Look, I&rsquo;m 84 years old. Writers of fiction have usually done their best work by the time they&rsquo;re 45. Chess masters are through when they&rsquo;re 35, and so are baseball players. There are plenty of other people writing. Let them do it.<br><b>So what&rsquo;s the old man&rsquo;s game, then?</b><br>My country is in ruins. So I&rsquo;m a fish in a poisoned fishbowl. I&rsquo;m mostly just heartsick about this. There should have been hope. This should have been a great country. But we are despised all over the world now. I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That&rsquo;s why I served in World War II, and that&rsquo;s why I wrote books.<br><b>When someone reads one of your books, what would you like them to take from the experience?</b><br>Well, I&rsquo;d like the guy&mdash;or the girl, of course&mdash;to put the book down and think, &ldquo;This is the greatest man who ever lived.&rdquo;