First Edition. Signed  and inscribed by Kurt Vonnegut.  (incribed "Happy rest of your lives!" 1993 ) Hard cover with dust jacket in a fine condition.      Fates Worse than Death, subtitled An Autobiographical Collage, is a 1990 collection of essays, speeches & other previously uncollected writings by author Kurt Vonnegut Jr.. In the introduction to the book, he acknowledges the book is similar to an earlier book, Palm Sunday. In it he discusses his attempted suicide.
This book includes a "humanist requiem" that Vonnegut wrote as a reaction to the Roman Catholic Requiem, which he'd heard in Andrew Lloyd Webber's setting & whose text he found offensive. His own text was then set as a "Cosmos Cantata" by the composer Seymour Barab, of whom he said, "Barab's music is full of magic. He proved to an atheist that God exists. What an honor to have worked with him." The ending of this text is: "Let not eternal light disturb our sleep, O Cosmos, for Thou art merciful. Deliver me, O Cosmos, from everlasting wakefulness. On that dread day when the heavens & earth shall quake, when we shall dissolve the world into glowing ashes in the name of gods unknowable, I am seized with trembling & I am afraid until that day of reckoning shall arrive. Hence I pray, Deliver me, O Cosmos, from everlasting wakefulness on that day of wrath, calamity & misery. Rest grant us, O Cosmos, & let not light perpetual disturb our sleep