Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt VonnegutMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a long collection with a lot of short stories. They're all at least pretty solid, and some of them I love. I think my favorite- and I suspect this is a strange choice is "Who Am I This Time?" which I find to be exceptionally odd and romantic in a novel way.
The title story, "Welcome to the Monkey House" is very rapey and doesn't hold up to modern scrutiny at all, so it's really a shame that the entire collection is named this. Not surprisingly it was first published in Playboy. Ugh, boys and men growing up in the late 60s were reading this story basically justifying rape.
I particularly enjoyed the futuristic sci-fi/fantasy stories like "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" and "Unready to Wear." ("Harrison Bergeron" on the other hand seemed a little bit juvenile to me as a rather simplistic dystopian realization of liberal ideals.) The last story, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" could have been a full-length dystopian novel but maybe it would have been too big a bummer and is kind of darkly humorous as a short story.
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