Gramps Ford, his chin resting on his hands, his hands on the crook of his cane, was staring irascibly at the five-foot television screen that dominated the room. On the screen, a news commentator was summarizing the day's happenings. Every thirty seconds or so, Gramps would jab the floor with his cane-tip and shout, "Hell, we did that a hundred years ago "

Emerald and Lou, coming in from the balcony, where they had been seeking that 2185 A.D. rarity--privacy--were obliged to take seats in the back row, behind about a dozen relatives with whom they shared the house. All save Gramps, who was somewhat withered and bent, seemed, by pre-anti-gerasone standards, to be about the same age--somewhere in their late twenties or early thirties. Gramps looked older because he had already reached 70 when anti-gerasone was invented. He had not aged in the 102 years since.

"Next one shoots off his big bazoo while the TV's on is gonna find hisself cut off without a dollar--" his voice suddenly softened and sweetened--"when they wave that checkered flag at the Indianapolis Speedway, and old Gramps gets ready for the Big Trip Up Yonder."

He sniffed sentimentally, while his heirs concentrated desperately on not making the slightest sound. For them, the poignancy of the prospective Big Trip had been dulled somewhat, through having been mentioned by Gramps about once a day for fifty years.

Everything was perfectly swell.

There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.

All diseases were conquered. So was old age.

Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.

Never, never, never -- not even in medieval Holland nor old Japan -- had a garden been more formal, been better tended. Every plant had all the loam, light, water, air and nourishment it could use.

A hospital orderly came down the corridor, and looked in at the mural and the muralist. "Looks so real," he said, "I can practically imagine I'm standing in the middle of it."

"What makes you think you're not in it?" said the painter. He gave a satiric smile. "It's called 'The Happy Garden of Life, ' you know."

Slaughterhous-Five is one of  the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the  infamous fire-bombing 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 are afraid to know.

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.

Slaughterhous-Five is one of  the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the  infamous fire-bombing 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 are afraid to know.


From the Paperback edition.

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.

From the author of Timequake, this "irresistible" novel (Cleveland Plain Dealer) tells the story of Eugene Debs Hartke-Vietnam veteran, jazz pianist, college professor, and prognosticator of the apocalypse. It's "Vonnegut's best novel in years-funny and prophetic...something special." (The Nation)

Galapagos takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galapagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America's master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry-and all that is worth saving.

Called"our finest black-humourist" by The Atlantic Monthly , Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Now his first and last works come together for the first time in print, in a collection aptly titled after his famous phrase, We Are What We Pretend To Be . Written to be sold under the pseudonym of"Mark Harvey," Basic Training was never published in Vonnegut's lifetime. It appears to have been written in the late 1940s and is therefore Vonnegut's first ever novella. It is a bitter, profoundly disenchanted story that satirizes the military, authoritarianism, gender relationships, parenthood and most of the assumed mid-century myths of the family. Haley Brandon, the adolescent protagonist, comes to the farm of his relative, the old crazy who insists upon being called The General, to learn to be a straight-shooting American. Haley's only means of survival will lead him to unflagging defiance of the General's deranged (but oh so American, oh so military) values. This story and its thirtyish author were no friends of the milieu to which the slick magazines' advertisers were pitching their products. When Vonnegut passed away in 2007, he left his last novel unfinished. Entitled If God Were Alive Today , this last work is a brutal satire on societal ignorance and carefree denial of the world's major problems. Protagonist Gil Berman is a middle-aged college lecturer and self-declared stand-up comedian who enjoys cracking jokes in front of a college audience while societal dependence on fossil fuels has led to the apocalypse. Described by Vonnegut as,"the stand-up comedian on Doomsday," Gil is a character formed from Vonnegut's own rich experiences living in a reality Vonnegut himself considered inevitable. p class="MsoNormal"Along with the two works of fiction, Vonnegut's daughter, Nanette shares reminiscences about her father and commentary on these two works- both exclusive to this edition. In this fiction collection, published in print for the first time, exist Vonnegut's grand themes: trust no one, trust nothing and the only constants are absurdity and resignation, which themselves cannot protect us from the void but might divert.

An old man recounts his past to a voluptuous widow, revealing man's compulsion to create and destroy what he loves.

In story theatre style this play tells of the fateful meeting between Dwayne Hoover, Pontiac dealer, and Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's alter ego, in Midland City, where Dwayne bites off Trout's finger.

An anti-war novel in which Billy Pilgrim, prisoner of war, optometrist and time-traveller is the hero. This is a story of innocence faced with apocalypse.

One of America's greatest writers gives us his unique perspective on our fears of nuclear annihilation Experiment. 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.

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.

The richest and most depraved man on Earth takes a wild space journey to distant worlds, learning about the purpose of human life along the way.

One of Vonnegut's major works, this is an apocalyptic tale of the planet's ultimate fate, featuring a cast of unlikely heroes.

This is vintage Vonnegut - hilariously funny and razor-sharp as he fixes his gaze on art, politics, himself and the condition of the soul of America today. Written over the last five years in the form of a loose memoir, "A Man without a Country" is an intimate and tender communication to us all, sometimes despairing, always searching and ultimately wise and compassionate.

'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

Welcome to the Best of the Masterworks: a selection of the finest in science fiction When 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

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

The New York Times bestseller from the author of Slaughterhouse-Five-a "gripping" posthumous collection of Kurt Vonnegut's previously unpublished work on the subject of war and peace. A fitting tribute to a literary legend and a profoundly humane humorist, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of twelve previously unpublished writings. Imbued with Vonnegut's trademark rueful humor and outraged moral sense, the pieces range from a letter written by Vonnegut to his family in 1945, informing them that he'd been taken prisoner by the Germans, to his last speech, delivered after his death by his son Mark, who provides a warmly personal introduction to the collection. Taken together, these pieces provide fresh insight into Vonnegut's enduring literary genius and reinforce his ongoing moral relevance in today's world. Includes an Introduction by Mark Vonnegut

In "Breakfast of Champions, " one of Kurt Vonnegut's most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.

A rich man attempts a noble experiment with human nature. The result is an etched-in-acid portrayal of universal greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh.

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