About the author
Kurt Vonnegut was an American novelist, essayist, and humorist whose fiction mixed science fiction, autobiography, satire, and formal play. His plain sentences hold a persistent argument against cruelty, technological vanity, and the stories nations tell about war.
Vonnegut was himself a prisoner of war in Dresden in February 1945, and he spent twenty years trying to write about it. His solution was to refuse the shape of a war novel entirely: no heroics, no climax, just a shattered chronology and the Tralfamadorian view of time, in which every moment exists forever and death is only a condition at one address.
Where to start
Start with Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time — between the firebombing of Dresden, suburban life, and an alien zoo.
