Kurt Vonnegut’s very first public reading of the classic Breakfast of Champions, three years before it was published, on May 4, 1970 at the 92nd Street Y.
This is a world premiere of a book called Breakfast of Champions. Not even my wife has seen it and I simply passed the rumor around that it exists. So here we go. It’s a novel.
My name is Dwayne Hoover and I am an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. I am the only creature in the entire universe who has free will. I am the only creature who has to figure out what to do next and why. Everybody else is a robot.
I am pooped. I wish I were a robot too. It is perfectly exhausting having to reason all the time in a universe I never made.
The experiment with me began on the planet Earth. All around me were machines who appeared to be thinking and planning and worrying as much as I was, but they were no more reasonable than the Pontiac automobiles I used to sell. No more puzzled or adaptable than the music boxes my wife Celia used to collect. Celia was a robot too…programmed to collect music boxes, among other things…
