Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-five

Billy Pilgrim was unstuck in time. It sounds like a fairly conventional time travel story. But this is Kurt Vonnegut, and nothing he wrote was ever conventional. In fact, the...

The Sirens Of Titan

This is the novel in which we first encounter some of the themes and ideas that would later emerge in Slaughterhouse-Five. There are Tralfamadorians, there's the familiar resignation in the...

Cat's Cradle

Cat's Cradle is written in a style that makes me feel like Vonnegut's sitting back with a joint, having a laugh, in on the joke that is life. It reminds...

Galapagos

It was in the isolated environment of the Galapagos Islands that Charles Darwin made the observations that were crucial to the development of his ideas of natural selection, and it...

Breakfast of Champions

Short on plot and big on message, this novel is comedic, satirical, and challenges conventions of form.