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Breakfast of Champions
- Narrated by: John Malkovich
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
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Slaughterhouse-Five
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Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).
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Don't Quit Your Daytime Job, James
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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 little person 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.
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KV at his best.
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The Sirens of Titan
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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....
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Absolutely Outstanding
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Deadeye Dick
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Deadeye Dick is Kurt 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, aka 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.
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If I aimed at nothing..nothing is what I would hit
- By Darwin8u on 11-28-16
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Eliot Rosewater, a 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 Kurt Vonnegut's funniest satire, an etched-in-acid portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh we are all heir to.
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Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth.
- By Darwin8u on 03-27-14
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Mother Night
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
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- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
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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, Kurt Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of grey with a verdict that will haunt us all. Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense.
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“We are what we pretend to be”
- By Robert on 09-04-12
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Slaughterhouse-Five
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: James Franco
- Length: 5 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).
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Don't Quit Your Daytime Job, James
- By Keith on 11-20-15
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Cat's Cradle
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
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- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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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 little person 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.
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KV at his best.
- By Robert on 06-22-12
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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The Sirens of Titan
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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....
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Absolutely Outstanding
- By Robert on 01-07-12
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Deadeye Dick
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Deadeye Dick is Kurt 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, aka 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.
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If I aimed at nothing..nothing is what I would hit
- By Darwin8u on 11-28-16
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Eliot Rosewater, a 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 Kurt Vonnegut's funniest satire, an etched-in-acid portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh we are all heir to.
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Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth.
- By Darwin8u on 03-27-14
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Mother Night
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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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, Kurt Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of grey with a verdict that will haunt us all. Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense.
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“We are what we pretend to be”
- By Robert on 09-04-12
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Player Piano
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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.
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A Genuine 5-Stars
- By R.A. on 06-07-19
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Hocus Pocus
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: LJ Ganser
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Eugene Debs Hartke describes an odyssey from college professor to prison inmate to prison warden back again to prisoner in another of Vonnegut's bitter satirical explorations of how and where (and why) the American dream begins to die. Employing his characteristic narrative device - a retrospective diary in which the protagonist retraces his life at its end, a desperate and disconnected series of events here in Hocus Pocus show Vonnegut with his mask off and his rhetorical devices unshielded.
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Vonnegut Imitating Vonnegut
- By Joe Kraus on 08-06-18
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Bluebeard
- The Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916-1988)
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Meet Rabo Karabekian, a moderately successful surrealist painter who we meet late in life and see struggling (like all of Vonnegut's key characters) with the dregs of unresolved pain and the consequences of brutality. Loosely based on the legend of Bluebeard (best realized in Bela Bartok's one-act opera), the novel follows Karabekian through the last events in his life that is heavy with women, painting, artistic ambition, artistic fraudulence, and as of yet unknown consequence.
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Kurt Vonnegut explores the arts
- By Darwin8u on 12-28-17
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Welcome to the Monkey House
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: David Strathairn, Maria Tucci, Bill Irwin, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's 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.
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Classic Vonnegut
- By Michael Carrato on 08-17-06
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Slapstick
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Adam Grupper
- Length: 4 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Perhaps the most autobiographical (and deliberately least disciplined) of Vonnegut's novels, Slapstick (1976) is in the form of a broken family odyssey and is surely a demonstration of its eponymous title. The story centers on brother and sister twins, children of Wilbur Swain, who are in sympathetic and (possibly) telepathic communication and who represent Vonnegut's relationship with his own sister who died young of cancer almost two decades before the book's publication.
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Lonely No More!
- By Darwin8u on 11-16-16
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Galapagos
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Galapagos takes the listener back one million years to AD 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galapagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, totally different human race. Kurt Vonnegut, America's master satirist, looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry - and all that is worth saving.
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The survival of the human race is a total bore!
- By Darwin8u on 12-13-16
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Timequake
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Arthur Bishop
- Length: 4 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
According to Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego, the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur on February 13, 2001, at 2:27 p.m. It will be the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience: Should it go on expanding indefinitely or collapse and make another great big BANG? For its own cosmic reasons, it decides to back up a decade to 1991, giving the world a 10-year case of deja vu, making everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during the past decade.
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Arias only make hopeless situations worse
- By Darwin8u on 12-28-17
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Fahrenheit 451
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: Tim Robbins
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family."
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Wish I Hadn't Cliff Noted This in High School
- By Joel on 03-27-17
By: Ray Bradbury
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Fates Worse Than Death
- An Autobiographical Collage
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Richard Davidson
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Kurt Vonnegut presents in Fates Worse than Death a veritable cornucopia of his thoughts on what could perhaps best be summed up as "anti-theology", a manifesto for atheism that details Vonnegut's drift from conventional religion, even a tract evidencing belief in the divine held within each individual self--the deity within each individual person present in a universe that otherwise lacks any real order.
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Vonnegut is profound
- By Sarah on 02-03-20
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
- By: Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.
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What in the heck happened?????
- By Melinda on 02-05-14
By: Gabriel García Márquez, and others
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Jailbird
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Walter Starbuck, a career humanist and eventual low-level aide in the Nixon White House, is implicated in Watergate and jailed, after which he (like Howard Campbell in Mother Night) works on his memoirs. Starbuck is innocent (his office was used as a base for the Watergate shenanigans of which he had no knowledge), and yet he is not innocent (he has collaborated with power unquestioningly and served societal order all his life). He represents another Vonnegut Everyman caught amongst forces he neither understands nor can defend.
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a fool and his self respect are soon parted
- By Darwin8u on 11-18-16
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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The Great Gatsby
- By: F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Narrated by: Jake Gyllenhaal
- Length: 4 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel of the Roaring Twenties is beloved by generations of readers and stands as his crowning work. This new audio edition, authorized by the Fitzgerald estate, is narrated by Oscar-nominated actor Jake Gyllenhaal (Brokeback Mountain). Gyllenhaal's performance is a faithful delivery in the voice of Nick Carraway, the Midwesterner turned New York bond salesman, who rents a small house next door to the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby....
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Simple, Beautiful, and Exquisitely Textured
- By Darwin8u on 04-09-13
Publisher's summary
Audie Award Finalist, Best Male Narrator, 2016
Breakfast of Champions (1973) provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonnegut's obsessions. His recurring cast of characters and American landscape was perhaps the most controversial of his canon; it was felt by many at the time to be a disappointing successor to Slaughterhouse-Five, which had made Vonnegut's literary reputation.
The core of the novel is Kilgore Trout, a familiar character very deliberately modeled on the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985), a fact that Vonnegut conceded frequently in interviews and that was based upon his own occasional relationship with Sturgeon. Here Kilgore Trout is an itinerant wandering from one science fiction convention to another; he intersects with the protagonist, Dwayne Hoover (one of Vonnegut's typically boosterish, lost, and stupid mid-American characters), and their intersection is the excuse for the evocation of many others, familiar and unfamiliar, dredged from Vonnegut's gallery. The central issue is concerned with intersecting and apposite views of reality, and much of the narrative is filtered through Trout, who is neither certifiably insane nor a visionary writer but can pass for either depending upon Dwayne Hoover's (and Vonnegut's) view of the situation.
America, when this novel was published, was in the throes of Nixon, Watergate, and the unraveling of our intervention in Vietnam; the nation was beginning to fragment ideologically and geographically, and Vonnegut sought to cram all of this dysfunction (and a goofy, desperate kind of hope, the irrational comfort given through the genre of science fiction) into a sprawling narrative whose sense, if any, is situational, not conceptual. Reviews were polarized; the novel was celebrated for its bizarre aspects and became the basis of a Bruce Willis movie adaptation whose reviews were not nearly so polarized. (Most critics hated it.)
Featured Article: 70+ Unforgettable Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
Kurt Vonnegut had an extremely productive career, penning everything from plays to short stories to full-length nonfiction. Drawing on his experiences of war, life, and love, Vonnegut’s powerful messages were delivered so creatively—and often quite satirically—ensuring that they stood the test of time. This assortment of Kurt Vonnegut quotes is just a glimpse of the gems found throughout the works of this great author.
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Great Book, Great Reader
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What do the lives of Lincoln, Helen Keller, Joan of Arc, and other historical figures have in common with Paula Poundstone? In the hands of this wryly observant and self-deprecating comedian, the answer is outrageously funny and unexpectedly touching. Poundstone compares her crazy life to theirs, as she holds forth on her children, her career, and the time in her life when it appeared she would lose them both.
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More!
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Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up
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Yes, it's true: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dave Barry's columns get out of the paper and sent around more than those of any other columnist in America. Join Dave as he runs for president, plays Claptonesque guitar in the world's most literary band (The Rock-Bottom Remainders), and gets the real scoop on all those UFO sightings. Warning: Dave Barry has a knack for giving his readers a few laughs and lots of expensive merchandise (ordered from the Home Shopping Club). No, we're not making this up!
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Dave Barry Makes Me Happy
- By Sher from Provo on 11-17-11
By: Dave Barry
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Slaughterhouse-Five
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Don't Quit Your Daytime Job, James
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Welcome to the Monkey House
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Classic Vonnegut
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By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Falconer
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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A convict named Farragut struggles to remain a man while inside a nightmarish prison. Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation.
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Unsettling and beautiful
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For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie. But now Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life: he has left Charlie something in his will.
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Yes, it's true: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dave Barry's columns get out of the paper and sent around more than those of any other columnist in America. Join Dave as he runs for president, plays Claptonesque guitar in the world's most literary band (The Rock-Bottom Remainders), and gets the real scoop on all those UFO sightings. Warning: Dave Barry has a knack for giving his readers a few laughs and lots of expensive merchandise (ordered from the Home Shopping Club). No, we're not making this up!
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The Night Ocean
- By: Paul La Farge
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Marina Willett, MD, has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears.
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Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
- By Adam on 06-15-17
By: Paul La Farge
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Please Don't Eat the Daisies
- By: Jean Kerr
- Narrated by: Marni Webb
- Length: 2 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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This collection of essays observes the perils of motherhood, wifehood, selfhood, and other assorted challenges. Since its publication in 1957, it has sold millions of copies and has been adapted into a Broadway play, a film, a TV series, and now an audiobook. Jean Kerr's parodies of the clichéd 1950s prescription for glamorous or maternal feminine behavior still resonate today as we enter the 21st century.
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Poor narration of smart, dry, funny essays
- By Buyseverythingonline on 04-30-16
By: Jean Kerr
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Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
- By: John Irving
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Trying to Save Piggy Sneed contains a dozen short works by John Irving, beginning with three memoirs, including an account of Mr. Irving’s dinner with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. The longest of the memoirs, The Imaginary Girlfriend,” is the core of this collection.
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Unabridged?
- By K. Stiffler on 02-11-22
By: John Irving
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Sunny's Nights
- Lost and Found at the Bar at the End of the World
- By: Tim Sultan
- Narrated by: Robert Malloch
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine that Alice had walked into a bar instead of falling down the rabbit hole. In the tradition of J. R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar and the classic reportage of Joseph Mitchell, here is an indelible portrait of what is quite possibly the greatest bar in the world—and the mercurial, magnificent man behind it. The first time he saw Sunny’s Bar, in 1995, Tim Sultan was lost, thirsty for a drink, and intrigued by the single bar sign among the forlorn warehouses lining the Brooklyn waterfront.
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Visiting an Era
- By Carolyn on 03-01-16
By: Tim Sultan
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Andy Rooney
- 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit
- By: Andy Rooney
- Narrated by: J. Paul Guimont
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Chairs. Neat people. Ugliness. War. Over six decades of intrepid reporting and elegant essays, Andy Rooney has proven a shrewd cultural analyst. Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit brings together the best of more than a half-century of work (including long-out-of-print pieces from his early years) in an unforgettable celebration of one of America’s funniest men. Like Mark Twain, Finley Peter Dunne (Mister Dooley) and Will Rogers, Andy Rooney is a classic chronicler of America, a writer for the ages.
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A good style
- By Denise L. Holtz on 11-04-16
By: Andy Rooney
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The Visiting Privilege
- New and Collected Stories
- By: Joy Williams
- Narrated by: Richard Powers, Emily Woo Zeller, Elisabeth Rodgers, and others
- Length: 20 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. And at long last the incredible scope of her singular achievement is put on display: 33 stories drawn from three much-lauded collections and another 13 appearing here for the first time in book form.
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I sure tried.
- By A.C. CALLOWAY on 01-28-24
By: Joy Williams
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Mislaid
- A Novel
- By: Nell Zink
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The couple are mismatched from the start - she's a lesbian, he's gay - but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind.
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Misbegotten, mishandled, misfired novel
- By Julie W. Capell on 02-07-16
By: Nell Zink
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Travels with Charley in Search of America
- By: John Steinbeck
- Narrated by: Gary Sinise
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In September 1960, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America, from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Travels with Charley is animated by Steinbeck’s attention to the specific details of the natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately connected to the rhythms of nature—to weather, geography, the cycles of the seasons. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident, too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the Americans he encounters along the way.
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Gary Sinise is fantastic!
- By C. Wilson on 01-11-17
By: John Steinbeck
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The World's Largest Man
- A Memoir
- By: Harrison Scott Key
- Narrated by: Harrison Scott Key
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Harrison Scott Key was born in Memphis, but he grew up in Mississippi, among pious, Bible-reading women and men who either shot things or got women pregnant. At the center of his world was his larger-than-life father - a hunter, a fighter, and a football coach. Harrison, with his love of books and excessive interest in hugging, couldn't have been less like Pop, and when it became clear that he was not able to kill anything very well or otherwise make his father happy, he resolved to become everything his father was not.
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I laughed every day to and from work. Loved it!
- By KufRN on 06-06-18
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Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth.
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Don't Quit Your Daytime Job, James
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Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth.
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Galapagos
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Galapagos takes the listener back one million years to AD 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galapagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, totally different human race. Kurt Vonnegut, America's master satirist, looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry - and all that is worth saving.
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The survival of the human race is a total bore!
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Bluebeard
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Meet Rabo Karabekian, a moderately successful surrealist painter who we meet late in life and see struggling (like all of Vonnegut's key characters) with the dregs of unresolved pain and the consequences of brutality. Loosely based on the legend of Bluebeard (best realized in Bela Bartok's one-act opera), the novel follows Karabekian through the last events in his life that is heavy with women, painting, artistic ambition, artistic fraudulence, and as of yet unknown consequence.
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Kurt Vonnegut explores the arts
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Deadeye Dick is Kurt 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, aka 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.
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If I aimed at nothing..nothing is what I would hit
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Walter Starbuck, a career humanist and eventual low-level aide in the Nixon White House, is implicated in Watergate and jailed, after which he (like Howard Campbell in Mother Night) works on his memoirs. Starbuck is innocent (his office was used as a base for the Watergate shenanigans of which he had no knowledge), and yet he is not innocent (he has collaborated with power unquestioningly and served societal order all his life). He represents another Vonnegut Everyman caught amongst forces he neither understands nor can defend.
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a fool and his self respect are soon parted
- By Darwin8u on 11-18-16
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Welcome to the Monkey House
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Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's 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.
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Classic Vonnegut
- By Michael Carrato on 08-17-06
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Timequake
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Arthur Bishop
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- Unabridged
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According to Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego, the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur on February 13, 2001, at 2:27 p.m. It will be the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience: Should it go on expanding indefinitely or collapse and make another great big BANG? For its own cosmic reasons, it decides to back up a decade to 1991, giving the world a 10-year case of deja vu, making everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during the past decade.
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Arias only make hopeless situations worse
- By Darwin8u on 12-28-17
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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What's Gotten into You
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- By: Dan Levitt
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- Unabridged
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Every one of us contains a billion times more atoms than all the grains of sand in the earth’s deserts. If you weigh 150 pounds, you’ve got enough carbon to make 25 pounds of charcoal, enough salt to fill a saltshaker, enough chlorine to disinfect several backyard swimming pools, and enough iron to forge a 3-inch nail. But how did these elements combine to make us human?
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One of the Very Best Science Books I have Read
- By TStair on 03-20-23
By: Dan Levitt
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Hocus Pocus
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- Unabridged
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Eugene Debs Hartke describes an odyssey from college professor to prison inmate to prison warden back again to prisoner in another of Vonnegut's bitter satirical explorations of how and where (and why) the American dream begins to die. Employing his characteristic narrative device - a retrospective diary in which the protagonist retraces his life at its end, a desperate and disconnected series of events here in Hocus Pocus show Vonnegut with his mask off and his rhetorical devices unshielded.
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Vonnegut Imitating Vonnegut
- By Joe Kraus on 08-06-18
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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If This Isn't Nice, What Is?
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- Unabridged
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Master storyteller and satirist Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most in-demand commencement speakers of his time. For each occasion, Vonnegut’s words were unfailingly unique, insightful, and witty, and they stayed with audience members long after graduation. As edited by Dan Wakefield, this book reads like a narrative in the unique voice that made Vonnegut a hero to readers and listeners of all ages. At times hilarious, razor-sharp, freewheeling, and deeply serious, these reflections are ideal for anyone undergoing what Vonnegut would call their "long-delayed puberty ceremony".
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Life advice from the ultimate cynic
- By Wayne on 12-05-18
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The Chestnut Man
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A psychopath is terrorizing Copenhagen. His calling card is a “chestnut man” - a handmade doll made of matchsticks and two chestnuts - which he leaves at each bloody crime scene. Examining the dolls, forensics makes a shocking discovery - a fingerprint belonging to a young girl, a government minister’s daughter who had been kidnapped and murdered a year ago. A tragic coincidence - or something more twisted? To save innocent lives, a pair of detectives must put aside their differences to piece together the Chestnut Man’s gruesome clues.
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Good until it is wasn’t
- By chitty chitty bang bang on 10-09-19
By: Soren Sveistrup
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Slapstick
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Adam Grupper
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- Unabridged
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Perhaps the most autobiographical (and deliberately least disciplined) of Vonnegut's novels, Slapstick (1976) is in the form of a broken family odyssey and is surely a demonstration of its eponymous title. The story centers on brother and sister twins, children of Wilbur Swain, who are in sympathetic and (possibly) telepathic communication and who represent Vonnegut's relationship with his own sister who died young of cancer almost two decades before the book's publication.
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Lonely No More!
- By Darwin8u on 11-16-16
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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The Neil Gaiman Reader
- Fiction
- By: Neil Gaiman
- Narrated by: Neil Gaiman, George Guidall, Lenny Henry, and others
- Length: 27 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning Gaiman’s career to date, The Neil Gaiman Reader: Selected Fiction is a captivating collection from one of the world’s most beloved writers, chosen by those who know his work best: his devoted fans. A brilliant representation of Gaiman's groundbreaking, entrancing, endlessly imaginative fiction, this captivating volume includes excerpts from each of his five novels for adults—Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Anansi Boys, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane—and nearly fifty of his short stories.
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52 Bits of Awesome
- By Southard on 08-11-21
By: Neil Gaiman
What listeners say about Breakfast of Champions
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Dubi
- 01-10-16
Kurt Was Right to Grade This a C
Breakfast of Champions was the first of Kurt Vonnegut's novels that I read upon its original publication. Like many others, I was introduced to KV via Slaughterhouse-5 and went back and read his entire back catalogue while awaiting his next title. 40 years later, whenever a KV audiobook comes up in a sale, I get it and re-read it in a format that should be, in theory, ideal for conveying his idiosyncratic voice.
My results have been mixed in a specific way -- books I didn't care for as in my younger days (Mother Night, Rosewater) are ones I loved listening to, timeless classics still relevant today, while those long ago dubbed classics (Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions) now come across as dated, juvenile, amateurish.
That I felt that way about BoC is no surprise -- KV himself gave it a C, the second lowest grade he gave his own novels. Listen: he was right. He tells you in the foreword (and he said it again over the years) that this is an exercise in dumping random ideas that were cluttering his brain. It sure reads that way. When he strays from his characters to pursue and purge these thoughts, he loses momentum from what could've been a good straightforward narrative, and he loses me. I'm all for metafiction, but his would've better as straight fiction.
I was hoping this version, with the great actor John Malkovich narrating, would make for a memorable audiobook experience. Malkovich should stick to acting. His deadpan delivery is all wrong -- he sounds like he is reading the lines for the first time. He takes long pauses in the middle of sentences and then runs on to new sentences without pause. I would normally blame myself for setting my expectations too high, but this performance by one of my favorite actors is technically and stylistically bad.
All that said, there are interesting angles for Vonnegut fans. Like Kilgore Trout, KV was dealing with newfound fame following the publication of S-5 and was not sure he wanted to keep writing, themes he explores. He was dealing concurrently with his son's schizophrenia (recounted in Eden Express), hence the primary themes madness, free will, perceptions of reality -- we didn't know about his when the book was published, but in hindsight, looking for this theme helped me get through the mediocrity of the overall work.
Be warned that there is potentially offensive language and subject matter. KV allows the racism of some of his characters to come through with frequent use of the N word, he informs the reader of the dimensions of every male characters' junk, and he also discusses female genitalia in detail.
On the other hand, KV has a genius for distilling things into simplistic language that really packs a punch -- he describes Vietnam as a war to save rice-fueled Asian robots from Communism by dropping things on them from the sky, and defoliants as chemicals used to destroy the trees the rice-fueled robots use to hide from the things dropped on them from the sky. (He doesn't call them Asian, he uses a slur that I will not repeat.)
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91 people found this helpful
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- W Perry Hall
- 02-05-16
Funny..., Even if Malkovich Could Not Care Less
This book is amusing enough if you've enjoyed other Vonnegut works, and even uproarious at times regardless of whether you've ever read Vonnegut. And yet, I couldn't help feeling like a newcomer to a succession of inside jokes, or to a running gag that only Vonnegut devotees get. I think this insider-feeling to the novel is one reason why Vonnegut graded this book a "C" in hindsight.
I was peeved at John Malkovich's narration, particularly since it was the clincher in buying this audiobook. In steely staccato, he speed read through this book with an unrivaled indifference.
By comparison, I've found other renowned actors' narrations have exceeded my expectations; for example, Maggie Gyllenhaal's reading/acting of The Bell Jar, Tim Robbins of Fahrenheit 451, Richard Armitage of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and Jennifer Connelly of The Sheltering Sky. I guess that's the difference between really caring and just cashing in.
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57 people found this helpful
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- Sara Lynne
- 06-30-15
two comments
1) Vonnegut speaks honestly about relevant social issues without being sanctimonious.
2) Malkovich says "doodely-squat" and "wide-open beavers" beautifully and its everything you could hope for.
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- Tim
- 07-03-15
Classic Vonnegut ; missed opportunity by Malkovich
What didn’t you like about John Malkovich’s performance?
Malkovich's deadpan tone is spot-on. Not spot-on is his frequent misreading of sentences and his weird tendency to run consecutive sentences into each other. I don't think Malkovich had his attention focused on the task. His mind was wandering. This performance was well done in many places, but in many other places it was distracting and off-putting.
If you are unfamiliar with Vonnegut or with this book Breakfast of Champions in particular, then I do *not* recommend listening to this audiobook. It will not make you a fan of Vonnegut.
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- Ryan
- 07-13-15
Do not listen if you haven't read the book
This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?
If you haven't read this book on paper, listening may ruin your experience. I learned through the narration that the book is heavily illustrated and the story directly refers to those illustrations - they are not merely complements.
I'll be returning the book so that I can read it in print. I would instead recommend Slaughterhouse 5 as narrated by Ethan Hawke if you prefer to listen. His was a fantastic performance.
Would you be willing to try another one of John Malkovich’s performances?
No. Minimum of fifteen words so I'll keep on rambling like the narrator about what I'm reading another sentence started here without punctuation and here is a picture of a wide open beaver.
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- Scott
- 12-12-15
Not one of his better ones
I love Kurt Vonnegut (and here there is a picture of a big heart). However, I don't believe that this is one of his better stories. Of course, he admitted it was not one of his better stories. In addition, because the drawings make the book a little more enjoyable, not having them makes it a little less enjoyable. John Malkovich (and here there is a picture of a bald man) does an OK job. However, his voice comes across as a bit bored.I'm curious how I would've experienced the story with a different narrator (and here there is a picture of a big question mark).
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- Julie W. Capell
- 05-16-16
Brilliant narration of a brilliant book
Just finished listening to Breakfast of Champions as read by John Malkovich. I thought Malkovich did an amazing job, his descriptions of the hand-drawn illustrations from the book made me laugh, as did many, many things in the book. Far from being “just” a reaction to the state of the world in 1973 when it was first published, the book seems to me to have been scarily prescient of the state of the world around me right now (2016).
There was so much I loved about this book there is no way I can fit it all into one review. Here are just a few of the things:
1) The way Vonnegut explained in one or two sentences what common words meant, as if someone in the far future were reading the book and would need explanations, as here:
“Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings.”
“A lamb was a young animal which was legendary for sleeping well on the planet Earth.”
2) Spot-on observations about the human condition, which appeared practically every paragraph, as here:
“The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they didn't use them for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interest of survival they trained themselves to be agreeing machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking and then they thought it too.”
“The whole city was dangerous—because of chemicals and the uneven distribution of wealth and so on.”
“It didn't matter much what Dwayne said. It hadn't mattered much for years. It didn't matter much what most people in Midland City said out loud, except when they were talking about money or structures or travel or machinery - or other measurable things. Every person had a clearly defined part to play - as a black person, a female high school drop-out, a Pontiac dealer, a gynecologist, a gas-conversion burner installer. If a person stopped living up to expectations, because of bad chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyway. That was the main reason the people in Midland City were so slow to detect insanity in their associates. Their imaginations insisted that nobody changed much from day to day. Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of awful truth.”
3) Sentences and sequences that made me laugh out loud, like this:
“Like everybody else in the cocktail lounge, he was softening his brain with alcohol. This was a substance produced by a tiny creature called yeast. Yeast organisms ate sugar and excreted alcohol. They killed themselves by destroying their environment. Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”
“Thomas Jefferson High School [..] His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of the world’s greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty.”
Brilliant, mind-blowing novel, totally different from anything else I have ever read. I would highly recommend this version narrated by Mr. Malkovich.
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- BookWorm
- 06-25-15
Magnificent!
If you could sum up Breakfast of Champions in three words, what would they be?
This is the best marriage of author to reader ever envisioned on this planet! Mr. Malkovich is perfection in his narration of Kurt Vonnegut's tragicomic meta-fiction novel. I hope he reads the rest of Vonnegut's canon. Bravo!
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- harry
- 07-06-15
a match made in somewhere and so on
This is the ultimate match-up; Vonnegut read by Malkovich. Huge Vonnegut fan that I am, he can do no wrong in my mind. Sassy and cynical, with depth but accessible. Our foibles, and follies, and self absorbedness in black and white. The quirk of Vonnegut is timeless and apropos. But we never open our eyes, do we. Ironically, my favorite part is the epilogue; a place I can closely relate and oddly brought me to tears.
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- Darwin8u
- 02-15-17
in nonsense is strength
“in nonsense is strength”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Sometimes, I think of Breakfast of Champions as top shelf Vonnegut (five stars). Sometimes I think of it as second shelf Vonnegut (four stars). I think it could exist easily on both shelves. Since I own a couple copies, and have read it a couple times, I will forever physically keep it on two shelves (Library of America on one, Laurel Mass-Market Paperback on a lower shelf). The Laurel Mass-Market is also the one I try to bribe and incentivize my son into reading. I'm sure the picture of the asshole and the beaver might just be the inspiration my sixteen-year old needs to start this book.
Imagine here is a picture of Vonnegut's drawing of an asshole tattooed on a young man's arm:
*
Imagine here is a picture of Vonnegut's drawings of beavers, in what looks like a Finnish copy of Breakfast of Champions (if you look really close you can also see Vonnegut's drawing of women's underwear bleeding through in blue):
*
Speaking of vaginas. Today is Valentines Day. Christians, and by Christians I mean a Pope (I can't remember who), tried to turn a Roman festival into a Christian holiday honoring a martyr (this also could be a common myth). I'm more fascinated, however, by Roman festivals than I am by martyrs or myths. Anyway, Valentines was supposed to smother out Lupercalia, a day where men dressed in the skins of sacrificed goats, in imitation of Lupercus, and ran around the walls of old Rome, with the thongs called februa in their hands whipping people (mostly people with XX chromosomes) who happened to be around.
Imagine here is an artsy painting of men dressed in goat skins whipping women:
*
Women, girls, and childbearing young women would line up to receive lashes from these whip-wielding Romans. Supposedly this was meant to ensure fertility, or at least prevent sterility, in women and ease the pains of childbirth (I'm not sure how the math works -- as if Pain from a whip is a negative (-) and pain of childbirth is a positive (+)). Anyway, I started and finished this book on Valentines. I also took my wife out for Mexican food tonight and bought her exactly 2.2lbs of dark chocolates.
Imagine here is a graphic showing how people decide which restaurants to go to on Valentines:
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The only reason I bring this up is today is Valentines and also because Vonnegut wrote published this book in 1973. Since, I was born in almost in the middle of in 1974, the reality is I spent some period of 1973 -- as this book was flooding the Earth -- being conceived (I try not to think too hard about this) and gestated (or this) and eventually birthed (or this either). I think, perhaps, my birth was so easy for my mom directly because of Vonnegut's book. This book. Yes, I am basically saying that in February 1974, this book, recently published might have been a literal februa for my mother. Perhaps, Vonnegut's pounding these words into existence somehow helped in my conception. Perhaps, Vonnegut is the one man in the Universe completely responsible for my existence. Yes, there is my father, but this is way beyond Fathers and Sons. All I know for certain that part of my brain since my teenage years has been marked, folded, energized by Vonnegut. Not through magic or some mystical force, but rather through the teeth and bite and whip of his words. The old fashioned way.
Finally, imagine here is a picture of my brain receiving its extra fold from Vonnegut's at age 5 months:
*
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