Search results for ""author kurt vonnegut""
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc Slaughterhouse-Five
£8.46
Vintage Publishing Welcome to the Monkey House
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 tennage 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.
£9.99
Orion Publishing Co The Sirens Of Titan: The science fiction classic and precursor to Douglas Adams
Welcome to the Best of the Masterworks: a selection of the finest in science fictionWhen Winston Niles Rumfoord flies his spaceship into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum he is converted into pure energy and only materializes when his waveforms intercept Earth or some other planet. As a result, he only gets home to Newport, Rhode Island, once every fifty-nine days and then only for an hour.But at least, as a consolation, he now knows everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will be. He knows, for instance, that his wife is going to Mars to mate with Malachi Constant, the richest man in the world. He also knows that on Titan - one of Saturn's moons - is an alien from the planet Tralfamadore, who has been waiting 200,000 years for a spare part for his grounded spacecraft . . . A finalist for the 1960 Hugo Award, The Sirens of Titan was Vonnegut's second novel. It received wide acclaim, and played with ideas of free will and predestination, themes he continued to explore in his later works. In 2015, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.-'The Sirens of Titan is marvellous. It's so funny it made me want to cry' - Infinity Plus'A classic, ripe with wit and eloquence and a cascade of inventiveness' - Brian Aldiss 'His best book . . . He dares not only to ask the ultimate question about the meaning of life, but to answer it' - Esquire
£9.99
Orion Publishing Co Cat's Cradle
One of America's greatest writers gives us his unique perspective on our fears of nuclear annihilationExperiment.Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it.Solution.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. Felix Hoenikker's death-wish comes true when his last, fatal, gift to mankind brings about an end that, for all of us, is nigh.
£9.99
Penguin Books Ltd Cat's Cradle
With his trademark dry wit, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle is an inventive science fiction satire that preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon - and, worse still, surviving it. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Benjamin Kunkel.Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to humanity. For he is the inventor of ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. Writer Jonah's search for his whereabouts leads him to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to an island republic in the Caribbean where the absurd religion of Bokononism is practised, to love and to insanity. Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction is a frightening and funny satire on the end of the world and the madness of mankind.Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was born in Indianapolis. 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, Player Piano, was published in 1951 and since then he has written many novels, including The Sirens of Titan, Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, Galapagos and Hocus Pocus. If you enjoyed Cat's Cradle, you might like Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'One of the warmest, wisest, funniest voices to be found anywhere in fiction'Sam Leith, Daily Telegraph'A free-wheeling vehicle ... An unforgettable ride!'The New York Times'Vonnegut looked the world straight in the eye and never flinched'J.G. Ballard
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Vintage Publishing Jailbird
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' - NewsweekVonnegut's riotous urban fairytale about the various fiascos of the Nixon years - a firm fan favouriteWalter 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.
£9.99
Vintage Publishing God Bless You, Mr Rosewater
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.
£9.99
Vintage Publishing Welcome To The Monkey House and Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
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.
£12.99
Vintage Publishing Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction
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.
£9.99
HarperCollins Publishers Bluebeard
From the author of Slaughterhouse 5. In Rabo Karabekian’s fictional autobiography, Vonnegut creates an impeccably funny satirical piece, through the reflections of a seventy-one-year-old man.
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Vintage Publishing Slaughterhouse 5: 50th Anniversary Edition
50th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL EDITIONAs a young man and a prisoner of war, Kurt Vonnegut witnessed the 1945 US fire-bombing of Dresden in Germany, which reduced the once proudly beautiful city to rubble and claimed the lives of thousands of its citizens.For many years, Kurt tried to write about Dresden but the words would not come. When he did write about it, he combined his trademark humour, unfettered imagination, boundless humanity and keen sense of irony to create one of the most powerful anti-war books every written, and an enduring American classic.This special edition is published with notes of appreciation from some of the book's ardent fans (Kate Atkinson, Richard Herring, Robin Ince) as well as fascinating extra material from Vonnegut's archive which casts light on the genesis, reception and enduring influence of an iconic American classic.Design © DIEGO BECAS
£12.99
Random House Slaughterhouse 5
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.
£16.99
HarperCollins Publishers Deadeye Dick
Rudy Waltz hasn't had it easy. After accidentally committing manslaughter at the age of twelve, the traumas life continued to throw at him seemed almost inconsequential. Now fifty-four, an expat living in Haiti, he's reliving the harrowing moments of his life that have left him in his current disillusioned state. But perhaps his ancestors, among them a father who was an unwitting patron of Adolf Hitler, have predestined him for the mad life he's lead. In Deadeye Dick Vonnegut expertly probes the ties between generations, and questions the conventional notions of morality. ‘Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer … a zany but moral mad scientist’ Time‘The master at his quirky, provocative best’ Cosmopolitan
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Vintage Publishing Palm Sunday
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.
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Vintage Publishing Player Piano: The debut novel from the iconic author of Slaughterhouse-5
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 ReviewWatch the documentary about his life - Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time - on Prime
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Penguin Books Ltd Cat's Cradle
'Vonnegut looked the world straight in the eye and never flinched' J. G. BallardThis 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
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Vintage Publishing Look at the Birdie
Look at the Birdie evokes a world in which squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town Lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. In "Confido," a family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. In "Ed Luby's Key Club," a man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. In "Look at the Birdie," a quack psychiatrist turned "murder counsellor" concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. The stories are cautionary they also brim with his trademark humour.Wry, ironic, satirical and poignant Look at the Birdie reflects the anxieties of the postwar era in which they were written and provides an insight into the development of Vonnegut's early style
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HarperCollins Publishers Galapagos
From the author of Slaughterhouse 5. The human survivors of the nature cruise of the century, are quietly evolving into sleek, furry creatures with flippers and small brains. All other forms of humankind have ceased to exist, made redundant by their prized big brains.
£8.99
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc Breakfast of Champions: A Novel
£14.99
Vintage Publishing Breakfast of Champions: Discover this iconic novel from the brilliant space-wanderer Kurt Vonnegut - rejacketed in a new, witty series style.
Discover Vonnegurt’s funny absurdist novel about the human condition. ‘Outrageous, witty, thought-provoking, unputdownable, scintillating, invigorating, ennobling, enlightening and masterly’ SpectatorIn 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
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Vintage Publishing Kurt Vonnegut: Letters
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.
£14.99
Vintage Publishing While Mortals Sleep
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.
£9.99
Vintage Publishing Mother Night
‘Black satire of the highest polish’ GuardianWhilst 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
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Amazon Publishing Sucker's Portfolio: A Collection of Previously Unpublished Writing
Available for the first time, Sucker’s Portfolio showcases a collection of seven never before published works from Kurt Vonnegut, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Short, sardonic, and dark, these six brief fiction stories and one non-fiction piece are consummate Vonnegut with piercing satire and an eye for life’s obscene inanity. Also available for the first time is an unfinished science-fiction short story, included in the appendix. These stories trace trivial human lives and mundane desires, which is precisely where Vonnegut’s inimitable perspective as a humanist shines, illuminating his alternating hopeful and dismal outlook, although undoubtedly focusing on the latter. Here as in his greatest novels, Vonnegut’s writing takes us to the darkest corners of the human soul and with wit and humor, manages to remind us of our potential to be something greater.
£7.87
Vintage Publishing Hocus Pocus
'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 ReviewSome 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.
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Vintage Publishing Slaughterhouse 5: Discover Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war masterpiece
Read Kurt Vonnegut's powerful masterpiece, which is as timely now as when it was first published.‘An extraordinary success. A book to read and reread. He is a true artist’ New York Times Book ReviewBilly 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.‘The great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.’ George Saunders
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Vintage Publishing Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s
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.
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Vintage Publishing Timequake
‘Timequake is sweet, wild and cock-eyed... Vonnegut has always had a true comic ear... A beautifully fastidious writer, utterly original’ - GuardianAccording 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.
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Seven Stories Press,U.S. Pity The Reader
£15.99
Seven Stories Press,U.S. Pity The Reader: On Writing with Style
£22.49
Penguin Books Ltd Cat's Cradle
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. BallardKurt 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.
£9.04
Seven Stories Press,U.S. Sun Moon Star
£16.99
Spokesman Books Fates Worse Than Death
£6.53
Seven Stories Press,U.S. If This Isn't Nice, What Is?
£14.99
Spokesman Books How to Lose a War
£8.11
Spokesman Books A Special Relationship ... with Truth?
£8.89
Archaia Studios Press Slaughterhouse-Five
The first-ever, critically acclaimed graphic novel adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five now available in softcover!Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most. Billy Pilgrim’s journey is at once a farcical look at the horror and tragedy of war where children are placed on the frontlines and die (so it goes), and a moving examination of what it means to be fallibly human. An American classic and one of the world’s seminal antiwar books, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is faithfully presented in graphic novel form for the first time from Eisner Award-winning writer Ryan North (How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler) and Eisner Award-nominated artist Albert Monteys (Universe!).
£14.99
£8.11