In a fine essay published by The New Yorker, Salman Rushdie offers his thoughts on Slaughterhouse-Five. Comparisons to Catch-22 and War and Peace are mixed with reflections on Vonnegut's exploration of free will and the cheerfulness at the core of Vonnegut's work. The...
It's been fifty years since Delacorte Press first published Kurt Vonnegut's masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, on March 31, 1969. The novel's popularity and influence continue to this day, and though Vonnegut, in the book's long introduction, described it as "a failure, and it had to be,...
The celebration of the 50th anniversary of Slaughterhouse-Five continues with news of two recent group readings of Vonnegut’s classic novel. First, from the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library (KVML), an interview with Chris LaFave, curator of KVML, and Debra Des Vignes, founder of the Indiana...
In Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut (1989, University of Alabama Press), Lawrence R. Broer writes: "A striking paradox of Slaughterhouse-Five is that it presents us with Vonnegut's most completely demoralized protagonist while making what is to this point the most affirmative...
In 2019 The Daily Vonnegut will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, "a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace." Over the next twelve months we'll...
Though Kurt Vonnegut identified as a secular humanist, he often described himself as a "Christ-loving atheist," and readers can find a wealth of reflections on Christ and Christianity within Vonnegut's work. Among The Daily Vonnegut's favorites: From Fates Worse Than Death: "The first story of mine that...
On November 11, 1922, a peephole opened quite suddenly in Indianapolis. Light and sound poured in, and the wisp of undifferentiated nothingness we now know as Kurt Vonnegut came into the world. Happy Birthday, Kurt! Wheelhouse Theater Company continues its lively revival of Vonnegut's Happy Birthday,...
With another school shooting in the news last week, it's worth revisiting some of Kurt Vonengut's writing about guns. In Fates Worst than Death, Vonnegut writes: "When Charlton Heston (a movie actor who once played Jesus with shaved armpits) tells me in TV commercials about all...
In a 2017 interview with The Daily Vonnegut, Professor Lawrence Broer discussed his 2011 book Vonnegut & Hemingway - Writers at War. In the following excerpt, not included in last year's interview, Broer discusses the evolution of Vonnegut's most famous character, Kilgore Trout: Q: How does the role of Vonnegut’s...
In 2016, Zachary Perdieu, co-Vice President of the Kurt Vonnegut Society, delivered a paper at the American Literature Association’s annual conference titled “’That was I. That was me.’ The Many Vonneguts and Their Relationship with Fiction.” In the following interview, Perdieu shares his thoughts on...