Works by
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
(Writer)
[1922 - 2007]

Audio

• Slapstick/Mother Night  (1979)
  Cassette

• Essential Vonnegut Interviews CD (2006)
  Over the course of Kurt Vonnegut's career as a writer, he sat down many times with radio host and interviewer Walter James Miller to conduct in-depth discussions of his work and the world. Now Caedmon has collected the best of these interviews on CD for the first time. This is the perfect audio collection for the Vonnegut fan who wants to understand the writer as he was, is, and will be.

Collections

• Canary in a Cat House (1961)

• 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.  (1961)
  Cats Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Welcome To The Monkey House, Slaughter House Five

• Welcome to the Monkey House (1968)
  Welcome To The Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnueguts shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.

• Kurt Vonnegut: Three Complete Novels (1980)

• Vonnegut Omnibus (1994)

• Bagombo Snuff Box (1999)
  In the 1950s and early 1960s, before television reigned preeminent, Kurt Vonnegut's short stories appeared frequently in popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening post, Collier's and Argosy. Filled with unforgettable characters, humor and satire, these stories offer a rare glimpse into a developing master of fiction.

Fiction

• Player Piano (1952)
  Vonnegut’s first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a super computer and run completely by machines. Paul’s rebellion is vintage Vonnegut–wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.

• Utopia 14 (1954)
  Man's revolt against a glittering, mechanized tomorrow.

• The Sirens of Titan (1959)
  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.

• Mother Night (1962)
  Mother Night is 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.

• Cat's Cradle (1963)
  Cat's Cradle is Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist; a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer; and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers. Cat's Cradle is one of this century's most important works... and Vonnegut at his very best.

• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)
  God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a comic masterpice.  Eliot Rosewater, drunk, volunteer fireman, and president of the fabulously rich Rosewater foundation, is about to attempt a noble experiment with human nature... with a little help from writer Kilgore Trout.  The result is Vonnegut's funniest satire, an etched-in-acid portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh we are all heir to.

• Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
  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.

• Breakfast of Champions (1973)
  Breakfast Of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result 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.

• SlapsticK: Or Lonesome No More! (1976)
  Slapstick presents an apocalyptic vision seen through the eyes of the current King of Manhattan (and last President of the United States), a wickedly irreverent look at the all-too-possible results of today's follies. But even the end of life-as-we-know-it is transformed by Vonnegut's pen into hilarious farce--a final slapstick that may be the Almighty's joke on us all.

• Jailbird (1979)
  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 penitentary 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.

• Deadeye Dick (1982)
  Deadeye Dick is Vonnegut's funny, chillingly satirical look at the death of innocence. Amid a true Vonnegutian host of horrors–a double murder, a fatal dose of radioactivity, a decapitation, an annihilation of a city by a neutron bomb–Rudy Waltz, a.k.a. Deadeye Dick, takes us along on a zany search for absolution and happiness. Here is a tale of crime and punishment that makes us rethink what we believe...and who we say we are.
  Galapagos (1985)
  Galápagos 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 Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave new, and totally different human race. Here, America’s master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry–and all that is worth saving.

• Bluebeard (1987)
  An old man recounts his past to a voluptuous widow, revealing man's compulsion to create and destroy what he loves.

• Hocus Pocus (1990)

• Timequake (1997)
  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.

• God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (2000)
  In what began as a series of quirkily characteristic ninety-second interludes for New York's public radio station, Kurt Vonnegut asks, on behalf of us all, the Big Questions. Could death be a quality? A place? Not an ending but an occurrence that changes those to whom it happens?
  
  As a "reporter on the afterlife," Vonnegut bravely allows himself to be strapped to a gurney by his friend Jack Kevorkian and dispatched round-trip to the Pearly Gates. Or at least that's what he claims in the introduction to these thirty-odd comic and irreverent "interviews" with the likes of William Shakespeare, Adolf Hitler, and Clarence Darrow, bringing readers to an entirely new place -- a place to which only Vonnegut could bring us.

Non-fiction

• Between Time and Timbuktu Or Prometheus 5 (1972)
  A space fantasy

• Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974)
  Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons is a rare opportunity to experience Kurt Vonnegut speaking in his own voice about his own life, his views of the world, his writing, and the writing of others. An indignant, outrageous, always witty, and deeply felt collection of reviews, essays, and speeches, this work is a window not only into Vonnegut’s mind...but also into his heart.

• Sun, Moon, Star (1980) with Ivan Chermayeff, Illustrator
  When the Creator of the universe came to Earth, It resolved to be born a male human infant, and this is what It saw when It opened Its eyes.

• Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (1981)
  Palm Sunday is a self-portrait by an American genius. Vonnegut writes with beguiling wit and poignant wisdom about his favorite comedians, country music, a dead friend, a dead marriage, and various cockamamie aspects of his all-too human journey through life. It is a work that resonates with Vonnegut’s singular voice: the magic sound of a born-story teller mesmerizing us with truth.

• Nothing is Lost Save Honor (1984) with David Levine, ed.

• Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (1991)

• A Man Without a Country (2005)
  A Man Without a Country is Kurt Vonnegut's hilarious and razor-sharp look at life ("If I die-God forbid-I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, 'Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?'"), art ("To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it."), politics ("I asked former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton what he thought of our great victory over Iraq and he said, 'Mohammed Ali versus Mr. Rogers.'"), and the condition of the soul of America today ("What has happened to us?"). Gleaned from short essays and speeches composed over the last five years and plentifully illustrated with artwork by the author throughout, A Man Without a Country gives us Vonnegut both speaking out with indignation and writing tenderly to his fellow Americans, sometimes joking, at other times hopeless, always searching.

Other

• Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1973)

• Cover: Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974), Cover art by Kurt Vennegut

• The Vonnegut Encyclopedia: An Authorized Compendium (1994) by Marc Leeds

• Treks Not Taken: What If Stephen King, Anne Rice, Kurt Vonnegut, and Other Literary Greats Had Written Episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation? (1998) by Steven R. Boyett

• Like Shaking Hands With God: A Conversation About Writing (1999) by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Lee Stringer
  On October 1, 1998, Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer spoke in front of several hundred enthralled fans at a New York City bookstore. During the course of that magical evening, the conversation touched on the process of writing, being a writer, as well as what it means to be human. This little book proves that these two writers are as articulate and moving on the printed page as they are in person.

• At Millennium's End: New Essays on the Work of Kurt Vonnegut (2001), Kevin A. Boon, ed.
  At Millennium's End looks back over the body of Kurt Vonnegut's writing, examining the novels, essays, and short stories of one of the century's most beloved and widely read authors and social critics. It also looks forward, projecting Vonnegut's relevance to the next millennium. The essays, by noted Vonnegut scholars and personal friends, are each written from the perspective of someone familiar with Vonnegut's entire canon.

• Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion (2002) by Thomas F. Marvin