Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim returns home from the Second World War only to be kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who teach him that time is an eternal present.

There's been a timequake. And everyone - even you - must live the decade between February 17, 1991 and February 17, 2001 over again. The trick is that we all have to do exactly the same things as we did the first time - minute by minute, hour by hour, year by year, betting on the wrong horse again, marrying the wrong person again. Why? You'll have to ask the old science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout. This was all his idea.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “For all those who have lived with Vonnegut in their imaginations . . . this is what he is like in person.”–USA Today
In a volume that is penetrating, introspective, incisive, and laugh-out-loud funny, one of the great men of letters of this age–or any age–holds forth on life, art, sex, politics, and the state of America’s soul. From his coming of age...

“[Kurt Vonnegut] strips the flesh from bone and makes you laugh while he does it. . . . There are twenty-five stories here, and each hits a nerve ending.”—The Charlotte Observer
Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, these superb...

"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...

"Here is an entirely new side of Kurt Vonnegut, Vonnegut as a teacher of writing. Of course he's given us glimpses before, with aphorisms and short essays and articles and in his speeches. But never before has an entire book been devoted to Kurt Vonnegut the teacher. Here is pretty much everything Vonnegut ever said or wrote having to do with the writing art and craft, altogether a healing, a nourishing expedition. McConnell has outfitted us for the...

Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? Truth and justice are blurred in this brilliant satire rife with true gallows humor. Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.

Vonnegut was in his early sixties and his career, still successful, drawing toward a kind of bitter summation when Galapagos (1985) was published. His early work with its unequivocal statement of absurdity and hopelessness was now almost four decades behind when he completed this meditation on Darwinism, fate and the essential irrelevance of the human condition.

Humanity has in the millions of years after inevitable holocaust and exile

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Here, Kurt Vonnegut's final short story collection—Bagombo Snuff Box (1999)—we have combined early and rather more obscure stories which had not appeared earlier. Drawn largely from the 1950s and the slick magazine markets which Vonnegut had from the beginning of his career in the postwar period demonstrated an uncanny ability to sell, these stories show clearly that Vonnegut found his central themes early on as a writer. More,

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""If ever I do write anything of length--good or bad--it will be written with you in mind." Kurt Vonnegut's oldest daughter, Edith, was cleaning out her mother's attic when she stumbled upon a dusty box. Inside were more than two-hundred love letters written by Kurt to Jane, spanning the early years of their relationship: from 1941, when nineteen-year-old Kurt heads off to college, to his deployment to Europe in 1944 and the couple's marriage in 1945....