My dad used to tell the most magnificent bedtime stories any kid has ever heard. Because he was studying Russian when I was young, many of his plots were borrowed from Pushkin or Chekhov. I didn’t know this at the time. I just thought my dad was particularly good at describing duels between arrogant counts and relating the existential malaise of the Russian civil servant. But the story that left the greatest impression on me was not about Russia. It was about a seven-foot-tall teenager named Harrison Bergeron.

In the story, Harrison rebels against a world of government-mandated mediocrity by bursting onstage during a ballet performance and freeing a troupe of strong, beautiful dancers from their weighted handicaps and ugly masks. My dad told the story with an obvious delight in its power. I was around seven or eight years old, and I remember feeling that many small fireworks were going off simultaneously in my head.

It wasn’t until I was a tenth grader moping around in my school library that I happened to pick up “Welcome to the Monkey House,” a collection of short stories by somebody named Kurt Vonnegut. The second story in the collection is called Harrison Bergeron. It was strange reading a story for the first time when its essence was already so firmly anchored in my subconscious mind. Everything seemed so weirdly familiar.

As I plowed through the rest of the volume, I realized that my dad had been on to something when he cribbed from this Vonnegut guy. The stories are silly and sad, bizarre and funny. A few of them, the really good ones, manage to mold that terrifying and amorphous stuff of life into something at once moderately comforting and weirdly familiar.

The 25 stories in “Monkey House” were written from 1950 to 1968, and a few fit into well-known categories like Big Theme science fiction (“Welcome to the Monkey House”) or trifling romance (“Long Walk to Forever”). In one of the most deft and prescient stories in the collection, a defense supercomputer writes love poetry to a mathematician named Pat.

Vonnegut can be as gentle, zany, or maliciously mordant as the occasion requires, but he never lets you forget that he’s Vonnegut. His spare sentences leave no room for insincerity or dishonesty, though they often house an unexpectedly large quantity of wit. As you read “Monkey House,” you might find your mind wandering back to the world, observing life’s banal evils and small triumphs. You might start articulating such thoughts clearly, with strong, simple words and basic grammatical constructions.

Some people dislike Vonnegut because they find his writing didactic or infantilizing or vaguely self-satisfied. Alternatively, maybe it’s because they notice that Vonnegut’s most ardent followers, many of them current or ex-college students, can be an insufferable bunch, flaunting dog-eared “Slaughterhouse-5’”s and publishing effusive tributes to his work in student newspapers.

This aversion is something you will have to get over. If a few of the stories in “Monkey House” lack the ambiguous depths that English majors are taught to prize, if they seem a little too blunt or flippant, simply skip the offending story and try the next one.

Or, failing that, you could try the following. Read the second-to-last story, “Adam,” a subdued account of an immigrant father wandering around Chicago on the night of his son’s birth. If you have a soul, you’ll find it authentically, happily heartbreaking.

Then read the last story, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” which is brash and cynical science fiction about old people who refuse to die. The two stories could not be more different, yet they discuss the exact same thing: the value we attach to human life. Look at how the stories enter into conversation with each other.

These are stories varied and rich and accessible enough for everyone: fathers and kids, loner tenth-graders and urbane college students. They are also appropriate for elderly shut-ins, Park Avenue wives, volunteer firemen, the President, etc.

If you do decide to pick up “Monkey House” for a first or third reading, be forewarned that the first lines of the preface are unintentionally sad these days. They read as follows:

“Here it is, a retrospective exhibition of the shorter works of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.—and Vonnegut is still very much with us, and I am still very much Vonnegut. Somewhere in Germany is a stream called the Vonne. That is the source of my curious name.”