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Featured novels and short stories by Kurt Vonnegut. See more by Kurt Vonnegut.
Jailbird by
"[Kurt Vonnegut] has never been more satirically on-target. . . . Nothing is spared."--People Jailbird takes us into a fractured and comic, pure Vonnegut world of high crimes and misdemeanors in government--and in the heart. This wry tale follows bumbling bureaucrat Walter F. Starbuck from Harvard to the Nixon White House to the penitentiary as Watergate's least known co-conspirator. But the humor turns dark when Vonnegut shines his spotlight on the cold hearts and calculated greed of the mighty, giving a razor-sharp edge to an unforgettable portrait of power and politics in our times. Praise for Jailbird "[Vonnegut] is our strongest writer . . . the most stubbornly imaginative."--John Irving "A gem . . . a mature, imaginative novel--possibly the best he has written . . . Jailbird is a guided tour de force of America. Take it!"--Playboy "A profoundly humane comedy . . . Jailbird definitely mounts up on angelic wings--in its speed, in its sparkle, and in its high-flying intent."--Chicago Tribune Book World "Joyously inventive . . . gleams with the loony magic Vonnegut alone can achieve."--Cosmopolitan "Vonnegut is our great apocalyptic writer, the closest thing we've had to a prophet since . . . Lenny Bruce."--Chicago Sun-Times "Vonnegut at his impressive best. . . . His imaginative leaps alone . . . are worth the price of admission. . . . His far-reaching metaphysical and cultural concerns . . . are ultimately serious and worth our contemplation."--The Washington Post
Mother Night by
Mother Nightis 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? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.
Slaughterhouse-Five
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Vonnegut describes as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he himself witnessed as an American POW. It combines science fiction, autobiography, humor, historical fiction, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber's son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. Billy, like Vonnegut, experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW, and, as with Vonnegut, it is the defining moment of his life. Unlike the author, he also experiences time travel, or coming "unstuck in time." Billy Pilgrim's odyssey reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.
2BR02B
Regarded by critics and fans alike as one of the most accomplished and witty social commentators of the twentieth century, all of Kurt Vonnegut's unique strengths as a writer shine in the short fiction piece 2BR02B. The title is a clever take on Hamlet's famous rhetorical question, "To be or not to be?" In this brave new world, it's the phone number one calls to schedule an assisted suicide or termination—both of which are commonplace occurrences in a time when the population is strictly controlled by government mandate.
Welcome to the Monkey House by 
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Critical Insights: Kurt Vonnegut
Critical acclaim eluded Kurt Vonnegut until Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969. An immediate best seller, it earned for the author respect from critics who had previously dismissed him as a mediocre science-fiction writer. Over the course of his career, Vonnegut was honored as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University, as a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and as the Distinguished Professor of English Prose at the City University of New York. Through his insightful and sympathetic treatment of the psychologically and morally crippled victims of the modern world, Vonnegut earned a reputation as one of the greatest humanist writers of his time.
Critical Insights: Rebellion: Social and Stylistic Rebellion in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” and Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”
This volume will explore the history, themes, styles, and forms of Rebellion in literature. It will focus on defining works, especially from British and American writers such as Melville, Dickinson, Shelley, and Amis. Authors represented will be diverse in gender and ethnicity as well as in their economic, spiritual, and political orientations.
Critical Insights: Slaughterhouse-Five
Published at the height of the Vietnam War protests, Slaughterhouse-Five seized the imaginations of thousands of young people and made Vonnegut into an overnight sensation. Now, more than forty years after its publication, scholars are only beginning to assess Vonnegut's unique achievement with this stoic yet compassionate treatment of what remains one of the most deadly military strikes in European history.
Kurt Vonnegut
A collection of eleven critical essays on the works of science fiction author Kurt Vonnegut.
Kurt Vonnegut's America
Kurt Vonnegut's death in 2007 marked the passing of a major force in American life and letters. Jerome Klinkowitz, one of the earliest and most prolific authorities on Vonnegut, examines the long dialogue between the author and American culture--a conversation that produced fourteen novels and hundreds of short stories and essays. Kurt Vonnegut's America integrates discussion of the fiction, essays, and lectures with personal exchanges and biographical sketches to map the complex symbiotic relationship between Vonnegut's work and the cultural context from which it emerged--and which it in turn helped shape. Following an introduction characterizing Vonnegut as Klinkowitz came to know him over the course of their friendship, this study charts the impact of Vonnegut on American society and of that society on Vonnegut for more than a half-century to illustrate how each informed the other. Among his artistic peers, Vonnegut was uniquely gifted at anticipating and articulating the changing course of American culture. Kurt Vonnegut's America shows us that Vonnegut achieved greatness by passing his own test--opening the eyes of his audience to help them better understand their roles and possibilities in the common culture they both shared and crafted.
Kurt Vonnegut : A Critical Companion
With a career spanning 50 years, Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most prolific and popular American writers of the 20th century. Though his works have often met with mixed reviews, and have been difficult to categorize, his status of cultural icon and one of the most important contemporary novelists is well established. This critical companion, perfect for students, skillfully guides readers through seven of Vonnegut's most important novels including Player Piano (1952), Mother Night (1961), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Slaughterhouse Five (1969). A full chapter is devoted to each work, with clear analysis of plot, character development, thematic concerns, symbolism, and a close critical reading. A chapter on the life of Kurt Vonnegut gives an up-to-date biography, with interesting details relating the facts of his life to his writings. The Literary Contexts section, devoted to examining issues of genre, influences and themes in Vonnegut's writing, adds to a fuller understanding of the man and his literary works. This exceptionally well-written Critical Companion will help students and interested readers appreciate Vonnegut's most important and popular novels. Close critical readings offer feminist, Marxist, and new historicist perspectives on these works. A bibliography helps students undertaking research identify additional sources for biographical and critical information, and provides reviews and a comprehensive list of Vonnegut's publications to date.
Kurt Vonnegut : Images and Representations
Since the publication of his first short stories in the 1950s, Kurt Vonnegut has enjoyed much popular acclaim and has, since the 1970s, gained growing amounts of attention from the scholarly community. In the course of his career, he has become increasingly concerned with visual images. While such imagery occurs in his short fiction and novels, he has also written plays, in which ideas are visually represented on the stage. In recent years, he has devoted more and more of his time and energy to graphic art, producing paintings that are then silk screened. The contributors to this volume look at the visual images created by Vonnegut in his literary art, along with the images and representations of his thought that increasingly are being brought to life in other media. Much of Vonnegut's present significance, his talents as a mythmaker, and his impulse toward visual imagery were anticipated by Leslie Fiedler in The Divine Stupidity of Kurt Vonnegut, published in the September 1970 issue of Esquire. That essay is reprinted here as a prescient introduction to the volume. The essays that follow look at comic elements in Vonnegut's science fiction, the representation of authors in his works, and the translation of his writings into film. The book also examines Vonnegut's graphic art and includes photos of several of his works.
Literary Wonderlands : A Journey Through the Greatest Fictional Worlds Ever Created
The Role of Science Fiction : Asimov & Vonnegut - A Comparison
In "The role of Science Fiction in selected works of Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut" the author elaborates upon important similarities and differences between the use of science fiction motives in selected works of Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut. The analysis includes Asimov's Foundation and Robots and Empire and Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan and Galapagos.
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