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.

Rudy Waltz

Kurt 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 supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul’s rebellion is vintage Vonnegut—wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.

Le pianiste déchaîné

Dans les années 60 et 70, Kurt Vonnegut s'est imposé comme un des écrivains les plus importants de sa génération, avec Abattoir 5 ou Le Berceau du chat. Aujourd'hui, c'est un homme indigné, " un homme sans patrie ", comme il se décrit lui-même, qui reprend la plume pour crier son désarroi dans ce pamphlet enflammé. Face à cette Amérique qu'il ne reconnaît plus, une Amérique qui court au désastre sous l'égide de ceux qu'il nomme les " psychopathes " de Washington, il a voulu écrire une profession de foi en une autre Amérique, l'Amérique des immigrés, attirés par des idéaux de justice sociale et de liberté qui se trouvent aujourd'hui relégués au second plan. Avec son humour noir et son sens de la dérision, mêlant les anecdotes tirées de sa vie tumultueuse aux considérations sur " l'état de l'Union ", Kurt Vonnegut nous livre, au fond, un message d'humanité, parfois drôle, souvent désespéré, mais toujours perspicace.

Un homme sans patrie

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. 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.

Galápagos

Voici l'histoire d'une rencontre entre deux hommes solitaires, maigrichons et plus tout jeunes. Le premier, Kilgore Trout, obscur auteur de science-fiction, passe ses soirées à prédire l'apocalypse à son seul ami, Bill, une perruche. Quant à Dwayne Hoover, riche concessionnaire Pontiac dont l'unique compagnon est un chien nommé Sparky, il est sur le point de perdre la tête. Lorsque Kilgore Trout rencontre Dwayne au cours d'un festival, il lui offre l'un de ses romans. La lecture de ce livre va transformer Dwayne en monstre.

Le Petit Déjeuner des champions

Like many Vonnegut's novels, Hocus Pocus is not organized in a linear fashion. It has a plot centered around a major event which is alluded to early & foreshadowed until the final chapters. The major plot event concerns a prison break in a small NY village, located directly across from a prominent university. The protagonist's life revolves around both the prison & university, & the community that must accommodate both. The main character is Eugene Debs Hartke, a Vietnam veteran & college professor, who realizes that he has killed exactly as many people as the number of women he's had sex with. The character's name is a homage to American labor & political leader Eugene V. Debs & anti-war senator Vance Hartke, both from Vonnegut's home state, Indiana. The main character's name-sharing with Debs, five-time Socialist Party candidate for President (one candidacy occurring while imprisoned), is explicitly discussed. The following Debs quote appears several times: "while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." In an editor's note at the beginning of the book, Vonnegut claims to have found hundreds of scraps of paper of varying sizes, from wrapping paper to business cards, sequentially numbered by author Hartke in order to form a narrative. The breaks between pieces of paper often signal a sort of ironic punchline. This theme of an episodic narrative & scraps of information is echoed in a recurring feature of the novel, a computer program called GRIOT. By inputting certain characteristics of a person's life situation, the program can give an approximation of what sort of life that person might have had based on the database of lives it can access. The main pieces of information required for GRIOT to work are: age, race, degree of education & drug use. Another unusual style element used in Hocus Pocus is to use numerals rather than words to represent numbers (e.g. "1" instead of "one" or "1,000,000" instead of "one million"). He explains this in an Editor's Note: "numbers lost much of their potency when diluted by an alphabet". The entire narrative is laced with Eugene's thoughts & observations about Vietnam, history & social conditions-- especially class & prejudice. Like almost all Vonnegut books, this is an account told in past-tense by a character who shares background with Vonnegut. It is also mirrors some parts of the Attica Prison riots.

Abracadabra

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.

Nuit noire

Nuit Noire

The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course there's a catch to the invitation—and a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell.

Rudy Waltz

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