Kurt Vonnegut
Author
Summary
Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller - these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. "Slaughterhouse 5" is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centring on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid...
2) Cat's cradle
Author
Summary
From the Publisher: Cat's Cradle is Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist; a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer; and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny.
Author
Series
Dell book volume 7948
Formats
Summary
“[Kurt Vonnegut’s] best book . . . He dares not only ask the ultimate question about the meaning of life, but to answer it.”—Esquire
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant,...
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant,...
6) Timequake
Author
Formats
Summary
Intersperses a story about a glitch in the space-time continuum that forces people to relive the ten years between February 17, 1991 to February 13, 2001 exactly as they did the first time, with Vonnegut's thoughts and experiences during the summer and autumn of 1996.
Author
Formats
Summary
Breakfast of Champions (1973) provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonnegut's obsessions. His recurring cast of characters and American landscape was perhaps the most controversial of his canon; it was felt by many at the time to be a disappointing successor to Slaughterhouse-Five, which had made Vonnegut's literary reputation.
The core of the novel is Kilgore Trout, a familiar character very deliberately modeled
...11) Galápagos
Author
Summary
The author takes the reader back one million years--to A.D. 1986 and the beginning of the human race with the descendants of a small group of survivors of an ill-fated cruise ship to the Galápagos Archipelage. The narrator is the ghost of a Vietnam veteran.
12) Bluebeard
Author
Summary
An autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, an abstract expressionist artist, who acquired the largest collection of abstract expressionist paintings in private hands.
17) Jailbird
Author
Summary
Walter Starbuck reflects on various aspects of American life as he has seen it during his sixty-six years.
19) Deadeye Dick
Author
Summary
A young man from a peculiar family background inadvertently shoots a pregnant woman while playing with a rifle. This catastrophe has an irrevocable effect upon his life. Rudy Waltz, a.k.a. Deadeye Dick, tells the story of his life as a middle-aged man expatriate in Haiti. In addition to the other catastrophes of his life, his hometown back in the U.S. is virtually destroyed by a neutron bomb. At the ending of the book, it appears that Rudy, while...