Author Kurt Vonnegut died a year ago today. The author of thousands of essays and short stories as well as numerous novels, including his classic, “Slaughterhouse Five,” was 84. Walking through a bookstore early last week, thoughts of Vonnegut crossed my mind. I couldn’t help but feeling that reader’s remorse when a favored author has passed on and the knowledge there will be no new words from his or her pen: No new books. Such were my thoughts of Vonnegut. There remain some of his old books unread, but there would be no new books from him. Or so I thought. A few days later in another book store, those thoughts were proven wrong. With backing from his son, Mark Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut has a new book, “Armageddon in Retrospect,” just in time for the first anniversary of his passing. A post-death publication is nothing new for an author, and it is usually sponsored by the author’s family. Last year, the son of “Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R. Tolkien was behind the publication of a new book by his father, though the elder Tolkien died about three decades ago. Several Ernest Hemingway books have been published since his death in 1961. So, a posthumous book is nothing new, though a reader never knows exactly what to expect. There may be a good reason why these books were not published during an author’s lifetime. The author may not have finished the work, meaning someone else had to finish after death; or the author may have felt the work was not good enough; or it could be a double whammy, the author didn’t finish the work because he did not consider it good enough. Or the posthumous published work is actually pretty good stuff that family or scholars discover afterwards. “Armageddon in Retrospect” is good stuff. Is it premier Vonnegut? No, but it is Vonnegut. And having found this volume a few days after considering never reading new Vonnegut again, it’s a great find. Unlike his last book, “A Man Without a Country,” in which he took the nation and particularly the current administration to task for what he considered a series of blunders and misdeeds, this book is primarily a collection of short fiction. Like many of his other books, however, Vonnegut’s focus is on the horrors and follies of war. Throughout his career, Vonnegut had a unique perspective on war. A World War II veteran, he was an American prisoner of war after being captured by the Nazis. He was in an underground prison bunker when American forces firebombed the German city of Dresden. What he has described as a beautiful city of art and culture was reduced to rubble and cinders and thousands upon thousands of mostly old men, women and children were killed. As a POW, Vonnegut was forced to gather the bodies of the dead Dresden residents. He witnessed the horrors of war from both his own side as well as the enemy’s perspective. Given this dark history, it is amazing that Vonnegut developed such a keen sense of humor in his writing. The humor was always there, sometimes as farce, sometimes with the skeletal grin of a death’s head. Humor remains here, too, as Vonnegut continues to grapple with war from beyond the pale.