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Powerful stories that make great gifts

Brave New World, Slaughterhouse 5 and The Handmaid's Tale photography

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Dystopian classics that make timely reading

VINTAGE Letters and Diaries to inspire you

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VINTAGE letters and diaries to inspire you

Four books by Kurt Vonnegut on a white table, lit by warm sunlight

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Where to start reading Kurt Vonnegut’s books

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Features

11 of the best Kurt Vonnegut quotes

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Clock-stopping books about time travel

Player Piano

A funny, savage appraisal of a totally automated American society of the future

The seeds of his [Vonnegut's] trademarks are here: a satirical eye on the world and deep love for humanity

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. An army intelligence scout during the Second World War, he was captured by the Germans and witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. After the war he worked as a police reporter, an advertising copywriter and a public relations man for General Electric. His first novel Player Piano (1952) achieved underground success. Cat's Cradle (1963) was hailed by Graham Greene as 'one of the best novels of the year by one of the ablest living authors'. His eighth book, Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969 and was a literary and commercial success, and was made into a film in 1972. Vonnegut is the author of thirteen other novels, three collections of stories and five non-fiction books. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.

Player Piano is the debut novel from one of history's most innovative authors, published on Vonnegut's 100th birthday. 
 
In Player Piano, the first of Vonnegut's wildly funny and deadly serious novels, automata have dramatically reduced the need for America's work force. Ten years after the introduction of these robot labourers, the only people still working are the engineers and their managers, who live in Ilium; everyone else lives in Homestead, an impoverished part of town characterised by purposelessness and mass produced houses. 
 
Paul Proteus is the manager of Ilium Works. While grateful to be held in high regard, Paul begins to feel uneasy about his position - especially after a trip to Homestead. Eventually, Paul makes the decision to rebel against all he's been given, inciting seismic repercussions... 
 
'His black logic...gives us something to laugh about and much to fear' New York Times Book Review 
 
Watch the documentary about his life - Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time - on Prime

Welcome to the Monkey House

A masterful collection of twenty-five short stories from the inimitable Kurt Vonnegut

After Vonnegut, everything else seems a bit tame

One of the master alchemists of modern American fiction

A cool writer, at once throwaway and passionate and very funny

A MASTERFUL COLLECTION OF TWENTY-FIVE SHORT STORIES FROM THE INIMITABLE AUTHOR OF SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5, KURT VONNEGUT 
 
'Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer...a zany but moral mad scientist' Time 
 
A diabolical government asserts control by eliminating orgasms. A scientist discovers the secret to unlocking instant happiness, with unexpected consequences. In an America where everyone is equal every which way, a teenage boy plans to overthrow the system. 
 
Welcome to the Monkey House gathers together twenty-five of Kurt Vonnegut's short stories from the 1950s and 1960s. Shot through with Vonnegut's singular humour, wit and bewilderment at humanity, this is a collection that celebrates a true master of short-form fiction.

Palm Sunday

An 'autobiographical collage' of speeches, stories and essays from novelist Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. An army intelligence scout during the Second World War, he was captured by the Germans and witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. After the war he worked as a police reporter, an advertising copywriter and a public relations man for General Electric. His first novel Player Piano (1952) achieved underground success. Cat's Cradle (1963) was hailed by Graham Greene as 'one of the best novels of the year by one of the ablest living authors'. His eighth book, Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969 and was a literary and commercial success, and was made into a film in 1972. Vonnegut is the author of thirteen other novels, three collections of stories and five non-fiction books. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.

FROM THE ONE-OF-A-KIND IMAGINATION THAT BROUGHT US SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5 AND CAT'S CRADLE 
 
 'Kurt Vonnegut is either the funniest serious writer around or the most serious funny writer' Los Angeles Times Book Review 
 
An 'autobiographical collage' of speeches, stories and essays, in Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut writes beguilingly about everything from country music to George Bush, his favourite comedians to his mother's midnight mania, and bittersweet tributes to a dead best friend and a dead marriage. 
 
Resonating with his singular voice, this is a self-portrait in writing that showcases why Kurt Vonnegut is as genius an essayist and commentator on American society as he is a novelist.

Cat's Cradle

'Vonnegut looked the world straight in the eye and never flinched' J. G. Ballard 
 
This bitterly funny Cold War satire on the end of the world expresses our deepest fears of Armageddon, and has become a counter-culture classic. 
 
'A satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion' Jay McInerney 
 
'The closest thing we had to a Voltaire' Tom Wolfe 
 
'The time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is not only entertaining, he is electrocuting' The New York Times

Kurt Vonnegut (1922 - 2007) was born in Indianapolis, USA. During the Second World War he was a prisoner in Germany and present at the bombing of Dresden, an experience he recounted in his famous novel Slaughterhouse Five (1969). His first novel, Piano Player, was published in 1951. This was followed by a considerable outlay of work, including the novels The Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, Galapagos and Hocus Pocus. He is widely considered to be one of the most important American writers of his generation.

Dr Felix Hoenikker - a father of the atomic bomb - has another creation. Far more dangerous than that which levelled Hiroshima is ice-nine, a chemical that could freeze the world's oceans solid. The search for Hoenikker leads first to his three children, each in possession of the chemical, and then to the Republic of San Lorenzo, a mysterious island in thrall to a bizarre religion. 
First published a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cat's Cradle is shot through with a nauseous anxiety about the nuclear apocalypse. Yet Vonnegut's darkly hilarious dissection of apathy and selfishness on the edge of the abyss speaks clearly to our own environmental angst and to the fragility of civilization.

Jailbird

Jailbird is Vonnegut's riotous urban fairytale about the various fiascos of the Nixon years

As provoking, as amusing and as silver-tongued as anything Vonnegut has written

Jailbird has the crackle and snap of Vonnegut's early work - his best since Cat's Cradle. Using the laid-back, ironic voice that has become his stademark, Vonnegut combines fiction and fact to construct an ingenious, wry morality play

An overtly political novel attacking McCarthyism and Watergate

J'ailbird has the crackle and snap of Vonnegut's early work - his best since Cat's Cradle. Using the laid-back, ironic voice that has become his stademark, Vonnegut combines fiction and fact to construct an ingenious, wry morality play' - Newsweek 
 
Vonnegut's riotous urban fairytale about the various fiascos of the Nixon years - a firm fan favourite 
 
Walter J. Starbuck’s life was on the up. With a Harvard education, a job in federal government and then in Nixon’s White House, everything was going great. Only things took a truly spectacular turn for the worse when his involvement in the Watergate scandal landed him in jail. 
 
Now, as the brave new world of the 1980s dawns, Starbuck is finally free and on his way back into the world. This is the story of the first twenty-four hours after his release, told with Kurt Vonnegut’s razor-sharp wit and satirical bite.

Hocus Pocus

Master of post-modern satire, Kurt Vonnegut patterns trajectories of sex, spite, crime and power in this kaleidoscopic novel

Although it is set in the near future, Hocus Pocus is the most topical, realistic Vonnegut novel to date, and shows the struggle of an artist a little impatient with allegory and more than a little impatient with his own country

Vonnegut's best novel in years-funny and prophetic...something special

Hocus Pocus is, of course, extremely funny. Jokes are told, deadpan and whiplash-sharp; neat, compulsive little anecdotes with stings in the tail jostle one another down the page

'Although it is set in the near future, Hocus Pocus is the most topical, realistic Vonnegut novel to date, and shows the struggle of an artist a little impatient with allegory and more than a little impatient with his own country' - New York Times Book Review 
 
Some get all the luck – but not Eugene Debs Hartke. Ex-Vietnam vet, ex-college professor, and now a TB-stricken inmate at Tarkington State Reformatory, his life has been warped by one ludicrous farce after another. Here, on scraps of paper pilfered from the prison library, he recounts his own story for posterity, revealing the hypocrisy and injustices of a world that just doesn’t want him to thrive.

Timequake

'A wise, winning and utterly charming concoction of fiction, commentary and autobiography' Literary Review

Utterly original...capable of moving from irony to lament within a sentence

Reading Timequake... I feel privileged to have spent several hours in the company of a most genial, affable and upbeat soul indeed...a wise, winning and utterly charming concoction of fiction, commentary and autobiography

Timequake is sweet, wild and cock-eyed... Vonnegut has always had a true comic ear... A beautifully fastidious writer, utterly original

Fascinating digressions, epigrams and memories, vitalised by Vonnegut's irrepressible intelligence and comic imagination, creating a movingly intimate work

Highly entertaining... The portraits of Vonnegut's first wife, brother and sister are beautiful, sharp, critical, loving

Wry and trenchant . . . highly entertaining.

His funniest book since Breakfast of Champions . . . There are nuggets of Vonnegutian wisdom throughout.

Timequake is a novel by, and starring, Kurt Vonnegut . . . What Vonnegut does, which no one can do better, is give a big postmodern shrug . . . You've got to love him.

Humorous, sardonic . . . Timequake makes for irresistible reading that's loaded with more important truths than it lets on . . . Moralizing has never been funnier.

‘Timequake is sweet, wild and cock-eyed... Vonnegut has always had a true comic ear... A beautifully fastidious writer, utterly original’ - Guardian 
 
According to science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur in New York City on 13th February 2001. It is the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience. Should it expand or make a great big bang? It decides to wind the clock back a decade to 1991, making everyone in the world endure ten years of deja-vu and a total loss of free will – not to mention the torture of reliving every nanosecond of one of the tawdiest and most hollow decades. 
 
With his trademark wicked wit, Vonnegut addresses memory, suicide, the Great Depression, the loss of American eloquence, and the obsolescent thrill of reading books.

Slapstick or Lonesome No More

A post-apocalyptic farce from cult hero Kurt Vonnegut

The non-stop invention, the jokes and clowning are in the familiar Vonnegut tradition

Manhattan has become the Island of Death. 
 
The former President of the United States stands barefoot in a purple toga around a cooking fire in the lobby of the Empire State Building. 
 
He is Dr Wilbur Daffodil-II Swain and Slapstick or Lonesome No More! is his story – one of monstrous twins, orgies, revenge, golf, utopian schemes, and very little tooth brushing. In this post-apocalyptic black comedy – dedicated to Laurel and Hardy – Vonnegut is at his most hilarious, grotesque, and personal.

God Bless You, Mr Rosewater

The story of a man who reacts to past tragedy, family greed and fabulous wealth by promptly going insane

Vonnegut faces up to the less glamorous phenomenon of human mediocrity in this sharp, hilarious, boundlessly humane story. It taught me about compassion and a few things about writing good dialogue

Rumbustious stuff... There may be greater novelists than Vonnegut, but there can be a few, if any, with as much good humour and generosity

Filled with irony and black humour and a woozy bonhomie

With the satirical eye of his science fiction author alter ego Kilgore Trout, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five delivers a classic of modern American literature. 
 
Eliot Rosewater, President of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation and volunteer firefighter, is tortured by an inheritance he doesn’t feel that he deserves. After (unfortunately) developing a social conscience, he sets out on a drunken tour of America, unravelling a little more at every stop until his path crosses with the science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout. 
 
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is one of Kurt Vonnegut’s funniest satires, about the pleasures, pains and perversions of people and money, the obsessions of a famous family and the collective madness of a nation.

Mother Night

A diabolically funny and macabre novel by the brilliantly wacky Kurt Vonnegut - now rejacketed with brilliant, witty new look for the backlist

Mother Night is not one of his most famous books, but it's one of the best

Vonnegut saw the worst excesses of humanity during the bombing of Dresden, but then spent the rest of his life writing with a mixture of exasperation and hope about the foibles of humanity.

‘Black satire of the highest polish’ Guardian 
 
Whilst awaiting trial for war crimes in an Israeli prison, Howard W. Campbell Jr sets down his memoirs on an old German typewriter. He has used such a typewriter before, when he worked as a Nazi propagandist under Goebbels. Though that was before he agreed to become a spy for US military. Is Howard guilty? Can a black or white verdict ever be reached in a world that’s a gazillion shades of grey? 
 
‘After Vonnegut, everything else seems a bit tame’ Spectator

Breakfast of Champions

Discover this iconic novel from the brilliant space-wanderer Kurt Vonnegut - rejacketed in a new, witty series style.

Another iconic title from the brilliant space-wanderer Kurt Vonnegut - rejacketed in a new, witty series style

Vonnegut performs considerable complex magic... Fresh, funny, outrageous...he very nearly levitates

He’s just so fucking amazing. Everyone should read Vonnegut.

A great deal of wit and playfulness...an entire universe of disorder is distilled

Outrageous, witty, thought-provoking, unputdownable, scintillating, invigorating, ennobling, enlightening and masterly

Brilliant... It seems,  at times, as if Voltaire has returned to satirise the horrors of plastic, disposable America

Discover Vonnegurt’s funny absurdist novel about the human condition. 
 
 ‘Outrageous, witty, thought-provoking, unputdownable, scintillating, invigorating, ennobling, enlightening and masterly’ Spectator 
 
In a frolic of cartoon and comic outbursts against rule and reason, a miraculous weaving of science fiction, memoir, parable, fairy tale and farce, Kurt Vonnegut attacks the whole spectrum of American society, releasing some of his best-loved literary creations on the scene. 
 
‘Vonnegut explains everything from an apple to the pyramids…weird, fast and inventive’ Daily Telegraph

Kurt Vonnegut: Letters

Sixty years of Vonnegut's life seen through his brilliant, entertaining letters

The collected letters of Kurt Vonnegut include some remarkable examples of epistolary eloquence… it is the tender letters to his youngest daughter, Nanette, that are the jewel of this collection

One closes this volume...full of gratitude for Dan Wakefield...the editor of this labour of love that gives us one more reason to love Kurt Vonnegut

This collection is perhaps the best insight into the everyday needles of a prolific author you could hope to read

Splendidly assembled and edited by Dan Wakefield . . . [Vonnegut’s] familiar, funny, cranky, acute voice . . . is chronicling his life in real time.

Droll and self-deprecating letters offer intriguing insights into Vonnegut’s life

This miraculous volume of selected letters provides a moving and revelatory portrait of the famed author of Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle. . . . Fans will find the collection as spellbinding as Vonnegut’s best novels, and casual readers will discover letters as splendid in their own way as those of Keats.

Unimitative and inimitable social satirist

A satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion, a cynic who wants to believe

Kurt Vonnegut never regarded himself as a great writer. But he did possess that undervalued gift of charm, of sociability. There are authors we admire or envy, but there are just a few we really, really love, and Vonnegut is one of them.

[Reveals] Vonnegut’s passions, annoyances, loves, losses, mind and heart . . . The letters stand alone—and stand tall, indeed. . . . Vonnegut’s most human of hearts beats on every page

[The letters] have a directness and a consistency, a scruffy but ensnaring humanity… Kurt seems by turns kind, engaged, imaginative, witty, self-deprecating (“I write with a big black crayon… grasped in a grubby, kindergarten fist,”) and – on various fronts – courageous

Crisply edited... There was something fundamentally goodhearted about Vonnegut. For all his gloom  and cantankerousness, he never entirely lost his faith in human nature.

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During the Second World War he served in Europe and, as a prisoner of was in Germany, witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. He is the author of thirteen other novels, three collections of stories and five non-fiction books. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007. 
 
Dan Wakefield first befriended Kurt Vonnegut in 1963. Like Vonnegut, he was born and raised in Indianapolis. He is a novelist and screenwriter whose books include the bestselling Going All the Way and the memoir New York in the Fifties.

This collection of Vonnegut’s letters is the autobiography he never wrote – from the letter he posted home upon being freed from a German POW camp, to notes of advice to his children: ‘Don’t let anybody tell you that smoking and boozing are bad for you. Here I am fifty-five years old, and I never felt better in my life’. Peppered with insights, one-liners and missives to the likes of Norman Mailer, Gunter Grass and Bernard Malamud, Vonnegut is funny, wise and modest. As he himself said: ‘I am an American fad—of a slightly higher order than the hula hoop’. 
 
Like Vonnegut’s books, his letters make you think, they make you outraged and they make you laugh. Written over a sixty-year period, and never published before, these letters are alive with the unique point of view that made Vonnegut one of the most original writers in American fiction.

Uncollected Short Fiction

Bagombo Snuff Box

Vintage Vonnegut – a unique collection of two dozen stories

One of the 20th century's finest humorists and humanists, a writer who has inherited HG Wells's visionary imagination and his gift for social commentary

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During the Second World War he served in Europe and, as a prisoner of war in Germany, witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired the canonic war novel Slaughterhouse-Five. He is the author of thirteen other novels, which include Cat’s Cradle, Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, Galápagos and Bluebeard, two collections of stories, and three non-fiction books. He died in 2007.

New York, 1950. A young PR man working at General Electric sold his first magazine piece. By the time he'd sold his third, he decided to quit his job and join the likes of Salinger, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner, and make a living as a full-time writer. That young man was Kurt Vonnegut. 
 
Bagombo Snuff Box collects Vonnegut’s favourite stories from the postwar years that sharpened his dark, vaudevillian and quietly subversive voice. Here we see the mind-bending wit and central themes of his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five. A must-read for Vonnegut aficionados new and old.

An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s

Fates Worse Than Death

A collection of autobiographical writings by the most zanily imaginative and brilliantly barking commentator of the post-war era

An American cultural hero celebrated for his wry, loonily imaginative commentary on war, apocalypse, technology, materialism and other afflictions... One of the last of a generation of great American novelists of World War II

Like listening to the monologue of an interesting man whose tongue has been loosened by just one glass of wine

Fates Worse Than Death is honest and scarily funny, and it offers a rare insight into an author who has customarily hidden his heart

Fates Worse Than Death is the latest volume of his cunning, rambling, edgy sermonettes, his wry, moral bomblets chucked night after night from podium and pulpit into gatherings of shrinks and museologists, Anglicans, architects, MIT graduands and the like. Rumours that the old boy was losing his knack of drilling straight into the nerve of western complacency can, on the evidence of this marvellously tetchy wit, be discounted.

Vonnegut's sharp wit and intellect are tempered but not blunted by his honesty and humanity

This is the second volume of Vonnegut’s autobiographical writings – a collage of his own life story, snipped up and stuck down alongside his views on everything from suicidal depression to the future of the planet and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Honest, dark, rambling, funny; this rare glimpse of Vonnegut's soul is a dagger to the heart of Western complacency.

An Autobiographical Collage

Welcome To The Monkey House and Palm Sunday

A selection of the best sci-fi shorts from an American genius of the genre, collected alongside his most personal essays.

These taut, concise stories show us the roots of a great Rube Goldberg literary career

Twisted, funny, sci-fi and high-concept. It’s a great, great book

A diabolical government asserts control by eliminating orgasms from sex in the title story of Welcome to the Monkey House – setting the tone for a collection shot through with Vonnegut's acrid wit, and his bewilderment at the corruption of humanity. 
 
From riffs on country music, George Bush, and his mother’s midnight mania, to a bittersweet tribute to a dead friend, Palm Sunday demonstrates why Kurt Vonnegut is equally well known as an essayist and commentator as he is a novelist. 
 
This caustic, funny and poignant collection resonates with Vonnegut’s singular voice.

Happy Birthday, Wanda June

The follow-up to Slaughterhouse-Five and the only play written by cult writer Kurt Vonnegut

Flashes of plain wisdom that made his writing so dear to so many

The wittiest man since Groucho Marx and the wisest since Karl Marx

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During WWII, as a prisoner of war in Germany, he witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired Slaughterhouse Five. He died in 2007.

For eight years, big game hunter and war hero Harold Ryan has been presumed dead, lost in the Amazon rainforest while hunting for diamonds. Now he’s back, only to find his wife engaged to a hippy doctor and his son transformed into a pampered sissy. Though his hunting trophies remain, an inexplicable birthday cake sits in the living room bearing a strange icing inscription: Happy Birthday Wanda June. Can the household bear the returning force of Harold’s machismo? And who on earth is Wanda June?

While Mortals Sleep

A collection of sixteen previously unpublished stories by the twentieth century master.

Vonnegut is masterful at quickly sketching a character who you instantly recognise and immeadiately are willing to follow... no matter the plot, you as the reader know that by the end of the story, you will get somewhere. That Vonnegut will tell you something with candour and clarity

While these early stories show an author still testing the boundaries of his craft and obsessions, Vonnegut's acute moral sense and knack for compelling prose are very much on display. In the foreword, Dave Eggers calls Vonnegut "a hippie Mark Twain," which perfectly captures an essential truth about this esteemed author

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During the Second World War he served in Europe and, as a prisoner of was in Germany, witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. He is the author of thirteen other novels, three collections of stories and five non-fiction books. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.

While Mortals Sleep is a smart, clear-eyed collection of stories from one of the most original writers in American fiction. Set in trailers, bars and factories, Vonnegut conjures up a world where men and machines, art and artifice, fame and fortune become curiously twisted and characters pit their dreams and fears against a cruel and comically indifferent world. 
 
Written early in his career, and never published before, these tightly plotted stories are infused with Vonnegut's distinctive blend of observation, imagination and scabrous humour. 
 
This collection features an introduction by Dave Eggers.

Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle is an irreverent and highly entertaining fantasy about the playful irresponsibility of nuclear scientists, beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range. 
 
'All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.' 
 
Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of Ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. 
 
Will Felix Hoenikker's death wish come true? Will his last, fatal gift to humankind bring about the end that, for all of us, is nigh? 
 
Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global apocalypse preys on our deepest fears of witnessing the end and, worse still, surviving it . . . 
 
'The time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is not only entertaining, he is electrocuting. You read him with enormous pleasure because he makes your hair stand on end' New York Times 
 
'One of the warmest, wisest, funniest voices to be found anywhere in fiction' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Vonnegut has looked the world straight in the eye and never flinched' J. G. Ballard 
 
Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922. He studied at the universities of Chicago and Tennessee and later began to write short stories for magazines. His first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1951 and was followed by The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You Mr Rosewater (1964), Welcome to the Monkey House (1968); a collection of short stories, Slaughterhouse Five (1969), Breakfast of Champions (1973), Slapstick, or Lonesome No More (1976), Jailbird (1979), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galapagos (1985), Bluebeard (1988), Hocus Pocus (1990) and Timequake (1997). He is also the author of a number of collections of short stories and essays. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.

One of the warmest, wisest, funniest voices to be found anywhere in fiction

The time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is not only entertaining, he is electrocuting. You read him with enormous pleasure because he makes your hair stand on end

Vonnegut has looked the world straight in the eye and never flinched

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922. He studied at the universities of Chicago and Tennessee and later began to write short stories for magazines. His first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1951 and was followed by The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You Mr Rosewater (1964), Welcome to the Monkey House (1968); a collection of short stories, Slaughterhouse Five (1969), Breakfast of Champions (1973), Slapstick, or Lonesome No More (1976), Jailbird (1979), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galapagos (1985), Bluebeard (1988), Hocus Pocus (1990) and Timequake (1997). He is also the author of a number of collections of short stories and essays. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.

'All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.' 
 
Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of Ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. 
 
Will Felix Hoenikker's death wish come true? Will his last, fatal gift to humankind bring about the end that, for all of us, is nigh? 
 
Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global apocalypse preys on our deepest fears of witnessing the end and, worse still, surviving it . . .

Bluebeard

There can be few [novelists], if any, with as much good humour and generosity... As in many of Vonnegut's novels, the career of his central character matches his own at several crucial points, and this gives his amiable fictions their sharp sting of the real... A tour de force that Vonnegut handles in a masterly way.

Kurt Vonnegut has been described by Thomas M. Disch as 'an artist surely destined for canonisation,' in the Times Literary Supplement. His novels include: Galapagos, SlaughterHouse- Five, Breakfast of Champions, Jailbird and Deadeye Dick.

Kurt Vonnegut has surpassed even his own giddy heights of hilariously bitter irony in Bluebeard. It is a novel so funny and yet so terribly serious that you will read it - then reconsider your own life.

Deadeye Dick

Rudolf Waltz's principal objection to life was that it was too easy to make horrible mistakes. He was himself to become a double-murderer at the age of twelve - on Mother's Day. This would at least make subsequent mistakes seem fairly trivial. 
 
Rudolf's father, Otto Waltz, had in 1910 bought a painting in Vienna from a destitute Adolf Hitler, thereby possibly saving him from starvation for a future generation. He made the further mistake of setting himself up as an artist when he returned from Europe to Midland City, Ohio, where everyone knew Otto couldn't draw for sour apples. He had funds to indulge this grand illusion (in the splendor of a vast converted 'medieval granary' studio, reminiscent of Mount Fujiyama) because his father had made a fortune producing an opium-and-cocaine-laced quack medicine called Saint Elmo's Remedy, popularly known to be 'absolutely harmless unless discontinued'. The Waltz inheritance even stretched to a troupe of black servants, which was just as well since Rudy's mother was as disinclined to look after a home as his 'artist' father was to paint.

Kurt Vonnegut

Read Kurt Vonnegut's powerful masterpiece, which is as timely now as when it was first published. 
 
Billy Pilgrim – hapless barber's assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier – has become unstuck in time. Hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, with the city and its inhabitants burning above him, he finds himself a survivor of one of the most deadly and destructive battles of the Second World War. But when, exactly? How did he get here? And how does he get out? 
 
Travel through time and space on the shoulders of Vonnegut himself. This is a book about war. Listen to what he has to say: it is of the utmost urgency. 
 
‘An extraordinary success. A book to read and reread. He is a true artist’ New York Times Book Review 
 
This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition.

Slaughterhouse 5

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