BAGOMBO SNUFF BOX: UNCOLLECTED SHORT FICTION

These stories, written for magazines in the '50s and early '60s, can't be mistaken for anyone else's, ranging as they do from sci-fi (''2BRO2B,'' a nightmare zero-population-growth utopia) to echoes of World War II (''Der Arme Dolmetscher''). As Vonnegut points out in his introduction, the stories are shards of a vanished civilization -- that remote pre-TV epoch when popular magazines published several short stories per issue, when readers devoutly devoured them, and when a young writer in search of his voice could support his family by churning them out. Mild as most of them are, these tales are worth reading; with the other early stories in Welcome to the Monkey House, they provide fans the complete test-tube Vonnegut. B+