Kurt Vonnegut Says He’s Retiring (We’ll See)

Newsday’s New York office once surveyed the city from the 39th floor of a salmon-colored building on 3rd Avenue at 49th Street. At ground level, it was commonplace during the late 1980s to see three famous personalities who lived in the neighborhood.

The great Katharine Hepburn would come and go from her Turtle Bay row house. The writer Dominick Dunne, Vanity Fair’s red-hot chronicler of the rich and scandalous, seemed to prefer 3rd Avenue as a thoroughfare. And the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, tall and shaggy-headed, always looked wrapped in thought as he ambled the streets, pulling hard on a cigarette.

Vonnegut now lets on that among his concerns was a novel that, he concluded last year, “did not work, which had no point, which had never wanted to be written in the first place.” He had spent nearly a decade on a story that “stunk.”

A terrible juncture for one of our best-known writers to reach.

What to do? “Fillet the fish. Throw the rest away.”

Vonnegut’s “Timequake,” which G.P. Putnam’s Sons plans to publish in the fall, now cuts back and forth between fresh elements of memoir and pieces of his abandoned novel, including further adventures of his longtime alter ego, Kilgore Trout. Book editors will have to decide whether the finished volume is fiction or nonfiction.

Either way, “Timequake” will contain the first Vonnegut fiction in book form since his last novel, “Hocus Pocus,” was published in 1990. It’s enough to thrill the fans, many of whom keep in touch with one another via Vonnegut sites on the World Wide Web and have been waiting for “Timequake” since word of its development started to circulate several years ago.

Adding to the moment is that Vonnegut, now 74, is saying “Timequake” may be his last book, period.

“Johannes Brahms quit composing symphonies when he was 55. Enough!” he writes in the prologue. “My father was sick and tired of architecture when he was 55. Enough! American male novelists have done their best work by then. Enough! Fifty-five is a long time ago for me now.” He suggests that he has nothing more to say.

We’ll see.

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Fortune’s ‘New Black Power’: The new Aug. 4 issue of Fortune appears to take a page, or rather three pages, from Vanity Fair, which has popularized the use of triple fold-out covers so that its annual Hollywood issues can showcase a bevy of young stars or starlets. Fortune’s striking cover folds out, and out again, to feature 13 exemplars of “The New Black Power,” including Earvin (Magic) Johnson, chief executive officer of Magic Johnson Enterprises, and Richard Nanula, chief financial officer of the Walt Disney Co.

The 40 pages of coverage signal that a growing number of African American men and women are, in the words of Managing Editor John W. Huey Jr., “taking their seats at the tables of business power.” Michael O’Neill’s group portrait resulted from separate shoots in New York and Los Angeles that were digitally altered into one.

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Kuralt and ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’: A certain 5-year-old boy we know has been having a wonderful time listening in bed at night to a posthumously released work by Charles Kuralt. “Winnie-the-Pooh,” along with the three other books written by A.A. Milne, were read by Kuralt because, the popular broadcaster said, as a boy he himself had loved the tales of Winnie, Eeyore and Christopher Robin, and he wanted his grandchildren to have the recordings.

“Winnie-the-Pooh” and “The House at Pooh Corner,” plus Milne’s two volumes of poetry, “When We Were Very Young” and “Now We Are Six,” will be available separately from Penguin Audiobooks, which expects them to be on sale by early September.

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Afterwords: Who says that men’s magazines are becoming more like women’s magazines? In the August issue of GQ: “A New Column for Guys Who Like to Cook.” . . .

Fairchild Publications says that Jane, the new magazine that founding Editor Jane Pratt has been developing for women 18 to 34, will go on sale Sept. 9. There will be two issues this year; 10 are scheduled for 1998. . . .

Wasting no time since selling Spin a few weeks ago, Bob Guccione Jr. was scheduled to make a formal announcement of his plans to launch Gear magazine (for men) at a party this evening in New York. . . .

Reader’s Digest will introduce in September the Reader’s Digest Large Edition for Easier Reading, a graphically enhanced successor to its ad-free Large Type Edition.

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Paul D. Colford is a columnist for Newsday. His e-mail address is paul.colford@newsday.com. His column is published Thursdays.