Slaughterhouse-five - kurt vonnegut

A new preface by the author highlights this 25th anniversary edition of Vonneguts classic and supremely unconventional World War II novel.

Based on Vonneguts experiences as a POW, this anti-war novel tells the story of chaplains assistant Billy Pilgrim.

A special fiftieth anniversary edition of Kurt Vonneguts masterpiece, a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century (Time), featuring a new introduction by Kevin Powers, author of the National Book Award finalist The Yellow Birds Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the worlds great antiwar books.

Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war.

It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barbers son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee.

As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW.

Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming unstuck in time.

An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language.

But it was precisely those elements of Vonneguts writing--the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit--that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it.

Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim OBrien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J.

Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonneguts words.

Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as the kind of writer who made people--young people especially--want to write.

George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us .

a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.

More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of th.