RosettaBooks has released a previously unpublished novella by Kurt Vonnegut. The 22,000-word Basic Training is on sale for $1.99 as a Kindle Single.
According to the publisher, the novelist tried to sell the novella to The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s in the 1940s. His children acknowledged that the story was autobiographical.
Check it out: “Written to be sold under the pseudonym of ‘Mark Harvey’—Vonnegut was working in public relations for General Electric and used pseudonyms to protect himself from the charge of moonlighting—BASIC TRAINING is the story of Haley Brandon. The adolescent protagonist comes to the farm of his relative, an old crazy who insists upon being called The General, who means to teach Haley to become a straight-shooting American. Haley’s only means of survival will lead him to unflagging defiance of the General’s deranged values.”