''In addition to novels, plays and nonfiction, Vonnegut has also published two volumes of stories. Canary in a Cathouse brought together about half of his shorter fiction, and was later expanded with additional stories as Welcome to the Monkey House. All of the work collected here was penned from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s and appeared in a wide range of national magazines, including Playboy, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal and Fantasy and Science Fiction. In his preface to Welcome to the Monkey House Vonnegut seems to dismiss these stories as commercial efforts, describing them as 'samples of work I sold in order to finance the writing of novels,' and adding, 'Business is business.'
''Larry L. King, in the New York Times Book Review, states that 'Welcome to the Monkey House fails to enhance Kurt Vonnegut's reputation. There are only brief glimpses of the hilarious, uproarious Vonnegut whose black-logic extensions of today's absurdities into an imagined society of tomorrow at once gives us something to laugh at and much to fear. . . . The rather pitiful state of magazine fiction is what one remembers most about this book.' However, although Stanley Schatt, in his Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., grants that Vonnegut 'will probably be remembered for his novels and not for his short stories,' he does believe that some of the stories are 'certainly memorable.'
''Apart from judgments regarding its literary worth, Vonnegut's short fiction is of interest for the insights it can provide into his novels. Like his longer fiction, his stories tend to fall into two categories: contemporary tales reflecting Vonnegut's own experience, and those that can be clearly labeled as science fiction. As Schatt points out, variations on many of Vonnegut's recurrent themes can be found in his short stories, and a number of stories actually contain settings and characters that also appear in the novels. 'Epicac' is about the same super computer that controls society in Player Piano. Diane Moon Glompers appears as a character in both God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and 'Harrison Bergeron.'''
A Slight Case of Candor
By MITCHEL LEVITAS

Last summer, when The New York Times Book Review asked a pride of distinguished novelists which of their works they would most like to reread while lolling among the sand castles, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. replied, disarmingly: "I can't stand to read what I write. I make my wife do that, then ask her to keep her opinions to herself." Diogenes would have shucked his barrel for honesty such as that. Nor was the remark a momentary lapse of candor.