If This Isn't Nice, What Is?

Illustrations Copyright © 2014, 2016 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Copyright Trust.
Courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

SEVEN STORIES PRESS
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Electronic edition published 2024 by Seven Stories Press, New York.
ISBN ebook edition: 978-1-64421-474-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN: 978-1-60980-610-1

Cover and Interior design by Stewart Cauley.

Printed in the United States

987654321

Publisher’s Note: The art by Kurt Vonnegut in If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? first appeared in Breakfast of Champions in ad hoc fashion. Here the drawings have been re-imagined and repurposed by our design team to accompany the author’s speeches because these particular texts and the notebook art of these drawings seemed to us to strike up intimate conversations with readers in similar ways. The Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Copyright Trust agreed, and so this rather than some other more eclectic combination of text and art is what we went with.

Chapter 1, “What to Do When You Have the Power; In the Meantime, Remember to Skylark!,” was originally published as “Up Is Better than Down” in Wampeters Foma & Granfalloons by Kurt Vonnegut copyright © 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Reprinted by permission of Dell Publishing, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Chapter 2, “The Terrible Disease of Loneliness Can Be Cured!,” was originally published as “Thoughts of a Free Thinker” in Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage by Kurt Vonnegut, copyright © 1981 by Kurt Vonnegut. Reprinted by permission of Dell Publishing, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.