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IMISS Kurt Vonnegut. In reading the dust jacket of his new collection of unpublished short stories, "Look at the Birdie," I am surprised to see that it has been more than 21/2 years since he died. It doesn't seem that long ago.

Perhaps it still hasn't sunk in that the author of classics such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Breakfast of Champions" will never write another word. Even over the last few years of his life, when he vowed he would never write again, there was always the possibility (likelihood?) that the world would be screwed-up enough to elicit some verbal barrage from his little corner of Manhattan. That hope has disappeared.

So the 14 short stories in "Look at the Birdie" are an unexpected gift, one that I relished but one that also made me wonder: What about those 14 stories kept Vonnegut from wanting to publish them, or what made them unpublishable? One can only speculate about the true reason, but having finished "Look at the Birdie" I can offer my humble assessment.

First off, these stories were written during a different era, a time when short stories were a common form of entertainment. Magazines routinely published the best and brightest, and writers could make a living by simply writing short fiction and selling it to magazines.

There was a lot of competition in that day, and a lot of good stories were being written. These stories may not have been quite up to either Vonnegut's standard or the publisher's standard at the time. But these stories, tinged with a lost innocence, still show important glimpses of who and what Vonnegut was to become--one of the greatest and wittiest writers of the 20th century.

The most memorable story in the collection is "FUBAR," which stands for "fouled up beyond all recognition." It is vintage Vonnegut, with a public-relations worker named Fuzz Littler stuck away in a big empty building of a huge corporation. His 9-to-5 life is dreadfully dull, and his life outside of the office is equally stagnant. His whole life seems hopeless and teeters on the precipice of a moribund existence in perpetuity. Into this life, Vonnegut drops secretary Francine Pefko--a little chink of optimism.

It is a bittersweet story because it shows what Vonnegut did better than anyone else: He showed that no matter how stultifying the day-to-day grind became, there was always a small reason for hope and a small reason to laugh or smile. That is gone now. That underlying hope, so prevalent in his work, has disappeared.

I miss Kurt Vonnegut.

Drew Gallagher is a freelance reviewer in Spotsylvania County.