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  • Published: 7 May 2019
  • ISBN: 9781784874858
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

Slaughterhouse 5

Discover Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war masterpiece




50th anniversary hardback edition of the bestselling cult US classic - with extra material

50th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL EDITION

As 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

  • Published: 7 May 2019
  • ISBN: 9781784874858
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

About the author

Kurt Vonnegut

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.

Also by Kurt Vonnegut

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Praise for Slaughterhouse 5

Marvellous...the writing is pungent, the antics uproarious, the wit as sharp as a hypodermic needle

Daily Telegraph

A laughing prophet of doom

New York Times

Mr Vonnegut knows a great deal about what is probably the largest massacre in modern history - the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945. Slaughterhouse Five is a reaction to the event by one of our most gifted and incisive novelists. A work of keen literary artistry

Joseph Heller, author of 'Catch-22'

An extraordinary success. A book to read and reread. He is a true artist

New York Times Book Review

Agonising, funny. His eloquent concern transforms something as pedestrian as a war movie seen back to front into a vision which, in its weird way, is as effecting as any short passage ever written against war

Time magazine

Unique...one of the writers who map our landscapes for us, who give names to the places we know best

Doris Lessing

Very tough and very funny...sad and delightful...very Vonnegut

New York Times

Splendid art... a funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears

Life magazine

Brilliant...this war story is expertly entertaining: various modes of popular heroics are parodied, pitiful instances of human folly stripped and displayed tragi-comically... Dense with reverberant cross-references and juxtapositions

Financial Times

The oddest and most directly and obliquely heart-searching war book for years...Devastating and supremely human

Guardian

A most courageous account of the human condition; at the same time a satire so funny it makes one laugh aloud

Evening Standard

Vonnegut uses fantasy to show reality in a new light... enormously funny

Observer

Extraordinary...Somehow the elements of comedy, insanity and horror push each other into the right perspective...the scrambling of the time sequences makes the novel delightfully easy reading without ever blurring the ghastliness or absurdity of what happened. The blending of fantasy and documentation is masterly

Sunday Telegraph

I came to this book later in life. I think it is, among other things, the loveliest, most delicate account of post-traumatic stress I've ever read — like the water that simply runs from the eyes of Billy Pilgrim.

Elizabeth Strout, author of 'My Name is Lucy Barton'