The collection’s first story, “Confido,” immediately reminds us how beautifully Vonnegut wrote, and how judiciously he measured out his most lyrical sentences. The first line: “The Summer had died peacefully in its sleep, and Autumn, as soft-­spoken executrix, was locking life up safely until Spring came to claim it.” The story involves an all-American mother of two and her husband, a lab assistant who dreams of inventing something that will change the world and the family’s fortunes. He comes home one day with a device that will do both, an earpiece that whispers highly personal suggestions in the ear of its owner. The invention is instantly addictive, and surely it will sell in the millions — but is it good for you? Will it improve life on earth or simply make its inventor a fortune while hastening the demise of mankind?

Image Kurt Vonnegut Credit... © Jill Krementz. All rights reserved.

The Vonnegut of “Cat’s Cradle” might have offered a different answer from the one presented here. The most surprising thing about nearly all of these stories is how simple and straightforward they are. Vonnegut loved a good surprise ending, considered it an elementary virtue of storytelling — but most of the endings in “Look at the Birdie” are startling because they’re straight-up happy. Later in his career came the endings where worlds die, heroes are cut down by knaves, villains amble off unscathed. Here, though, good and evil are clearly delineated, and the good guys always win. The bad guys are fat cats, crooked cops, snake-oil salesmen and communism itself (these stories were written in the 1950s). The heroes are young, virtuous men and women of modest means and pure hearts who find a way to triumph each time, not by winning the lottery or ascending to the moneyed classes, but simply by doing the right thing.

In “Ed Luby’s Key Club,” a married couple, Harve and Claire Elliot, come to a nightclub to celebrate their anniversary, as they have for 14 years. They’re turned away because the club has become an exclusive membership-only spot, with an actual golden key required to open the door. Soon, through a quick and horrific series of events, Harve and Claire are arrested, thrown in jail and accused of murder. As it happens, Ed Luby not only owns the nightclub, he owns the town — and the cops and judge, too. Things look bleak for Harve and Claire, and the reader can be forgiven if he expects the couple to rot in prison, victims of a system where justice has a variable price tag. Instead, there are action-­packed twists and turns, a high-speed escape and, ultimately, justice.

In the collection’s best and most nuanced story, “King and Queen of the Universe,” a wealthy young couple, Henry Davidson Merrill and Anne Lawson Heiler, walk through a city park at night, dressed up and feeling impervious to danger, entitled to all they’ve been granted. A desperate and disheveled man emerges from the shadows. The couple recoil, assuming imminent violence. But he doesn’t want to rob them; he wants to introduce them to his mother. “She’d think you were the two most beautiful creatures she ever laid eyes on,” the man, Stanley Karpinsky, says. Turns out she emigrated from Poland and sacrificed every­thing to put Stanley through college and graduate school. Now she’s dying, and her son has amounted (or so he thinks) to nothing. He wants Henry and Anne to come to his apartment and tell his mother he’s invented a world-changing apparatus. “I’ve got to be a big success tonight or never,” he says. The couple, improbably, agree. The mother is “speechless and radiant” at the sight of these glittery people validating the work of her son. She’s about to pass away, content that her sacrifices were worth it, when Vonnegut provides the shocking twist that’s a trademark of these early stories: “Then the cops broke in.”