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Timequake
- Narrated by: Arthur Bishop
- Length: 4 hrs and 49 mins
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Slapstick
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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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Vonnegut Imitating Vonnegut
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One of the greatest minds in American writing, Kurt Vonnegut shares his often hilarious and always insightful reflections on America, art, politics and life in general. No matter the subject, Vonnegut will have you considering perspectives you may never have regarded. On the creative process: "If you want to really hurt your parents...the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding."
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Good but uneven collection of essays
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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”
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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.
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Funny..., Even if Malkovich Could Not Care Less
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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
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Slapstick
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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!
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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
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A Man Without a Country
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Overall
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One of the greatest minds in American writing, Kurt Vonnegut shares his often hilarious and always insightful reflections on America, art, politics and life in general. No matter the subject, Vonnegut will have you considering perspectives you may never have regarded. On the creative process: "If you want to really hurt your parents...the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding."
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Good but uneven collection of essays
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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”
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Overall
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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.
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Funny..., Even if Malkovich Could Not Care Less
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By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Player Piano
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- Unabridged
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A Genuine 5-Stars
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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
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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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Please God, no more James Franco.
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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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Cat's Cradle
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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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Great book, awful recording
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By: Kurt Vonnegut
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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- Unabridged
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Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last 15 years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.
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Fun nonsense
- By Randall on 04-25-09
By: Douglas Adams
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Deadeye Dick
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- Unabridged
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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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Bluebeard
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- By: Kurt Vonnegut
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- Unabridged
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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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Galapagos
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- Unabridged
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Performance
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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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Great from start to finish
- By Tristin McCarthy on 02-05-19
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Jailbird
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
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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
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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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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We Are What We Pretend to Be
- The First and Last Works
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
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- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Called “our finest black-humorist” by The Atlantic Monthly, Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Now his first and last works come together for the first time in print, in a collection aptly titled after his famous phrase, We Are What We Pretend To Be.
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Not a place to start.
- By Robert on 11-02-12
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Palm Sunday
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In this self-portrait by an American genius, Kurt Vonnegut writes with beguiling wit and poignant wisdom about his favorite comedians, country music, a dead friend, a dead marriage, and various cockamamie aspects of his all-too-human journey through life. This is a work that resonates with Vonnegut's singular voice: the magic sound of a born storyteller mesmerizing us with truth.
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Incredible
- By Anonymous User on 11-17-20
By: Kurt Vonnegut
Publisher's Summary
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 - for good or ill - a second time.
As a character in and a brilliant chronicler of this bizarre event, Kurt Vonnegut casts his wicked wit and his unique perspective on life as he's lived it and observed it for more than 70 years.
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What listeners say about Timequake
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- D. Francis
- 12-01-17
Great story with disappointing narration
The narrator appears to not have understood the text and mispronounced many words. There was an earlier version of the audiobooks read by Lawrence Pressman that was excellent but can only be found on CD now.
9 people found this helpful
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- Darwin8u
- 12-28-17
Arias only make hopeless situations worse
Timequake was one of the first books my wife ever gave me. I don't know why it took me so long to read. I WAS a huge fan of Vonnegut 20 years ago when we first got married and I loved my wife. Clearly, I at age 23 I wasn't a fan of Vonnegut enough or trusted my wife's taste in books enough. I think I was just fearful Vonnegut was just mailing a final novel in. This was one of the last things he published, and I think it was his last novel (I might check this and find out I was wrong, it happens).
Anyway, I think all three of us were right. My wife was beautifully right in buying me Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut was right in writing it. I was right in waiting. I wasn't ready for this book. I'm now 20 years closer to death. I am now a father to two pimply teenagers who are sleeping tonight waiting for their parents to pretend still they are Santa and bring them goodies on Christmas morning. We are all pretending the best we can. We are all making the best of this short spin on Earth. I am now in a place where I can functionally GET the older Vonnegut better. I can get better his take on free will, money, morality, and art.
Timequake isn't a great novel, but it has absolutely brilliant parts. I love its lines and sentences better than I liked the book. It has a fantastic message about extended family and friends and community that I absolutely adored. It has so many good lines (yes, I said that before, but now I'm going to pull back the curtain):
"Only when free will kicked in again could they stop running obstacle courses of their own construction."
"Let us be perfectly frank for a change. For practically everybody, the end of the world can’t come soon enough."
"I define a saint as a person who behaves decently in an indecent society."
"...when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it."
"Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness."
23 people found this helpful
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- Dominic Acri
- 12-31-18
Vonnegut genius, notably aged
As a huge Vonnegut fan, this piece reminded me of all the things I love about his writing but something felt off. The foreword admits the original draft was considerably cut down and still this book could not escape the faults of a genius aged. Witty, inspiring, yet missing the cogency of Slaughterhouse 5 or Galapagos. Sharper than God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian, but does not crack Jr’s top 10.
2 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 03-15-20
Typical wry and dark Vonnegut humor...
I've always enjoyed reading Vonneguts' prose and none of it ever disappoints. While the voice actor/readers voice is average at best, I enjoyed listening to his work read aloud for the first time. Wit, intelligence, excellent insight into the broad spectrum that is the condition of mankind. As his alter ego Kilgore Trout makes a welcomed appearance--you are brought along for an exceptional weaving of Vonneguts own history and life while at the same time experiencing "the time warp". Ting-a-ling you son-of-a-bitch... Ting-a-ling.
1 person found this helpful
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- Niels J. Rasmussen
- 10-20-15
* Fantastic *
This book was SUCH a joy to listen to. The narrator did a great job of bringing Vonnegut's words come to life.
Kurt Vonnegut is easily one of my all-time favorite authors. This book is a perfect example of his genius. The book expertly wavers between a work of fiction and an autobiography.
I don't actually have much to say about this book aside from the fact that it was absolutely fantastic. It REALLY is a must-own for any fan of Vonnegut. Actually, even if you're not familiar with Vonnegut, it is still a must-own.
Although I give this book an EASY five stars, I still enjoyed Breakfast of Champions, (another book by Vonnegut), just a tad more. BUT - I actually enjoyed this book a lot more than the author's most famous books, "Slaughter House 5" and "Cat's Cradle". Why this book isn't more well known baffles me.
BUY THIS BOOK NOW.
9.92 / 10.00
5 people found this helpful
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- rmock
- 01-22-18
snoooooze
struggled to get past the tenth chapter... Slept through most of it. Usually love me some vonnegut, perhaps my mood wasn't in the right galaxy, or nebula if you will.
2 people found this helpful
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- Austin Martin
- 08-29-21
Ting-a-ling!
If this isn't nice, what is?
Vonnegut in fine form dazzling us while we contemplate deep questions and laugh at crude jokes. Brilliant.
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- j
- 08-13-21
Huh...
Only Vonnegut could get away with writing a long winded foreword about a book he felt was unpublishable, tack on an afterword.... and call it done. Not one of his best, but still Kurt Vonnegut.
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- Anonymous User
- 05-27-20
worth a listen
This book was incredible, and the actor reading it skilled. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Vonnegut's older books like cat's cradle, or slaughter house 5.
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- Victoria Bourque-Georgiev
- 12-02-15
Scattergories
What disappointed you about Timequake?
This is a book about absolutly nothing. I was very excited about the premise of a "Timequake" and there were so many places that the story could have gone. I am sorely disappointed that the Author didn't have much of an imagination about where this could have gone.
Has Timequake turned you off from other books in this genre?
No
What about Arthur Bishop’s performance did you like?
Very well read.
What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?
Disappointment
Any additional comments?
I will be returning this title.
2 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-02-22
As crazily true to life as ever
As a teenager, Vonnegut helped shaped my view of the world. Coming back to him nearly 50 years later was interesting. At first the style is even crazier than I remember, but once I got going it chimed with so much I feel about the world - maybe too close for comfort. It’s an auto-biography written as only he can. I ended up fighting back the tears (of sadness not laughter) - but that’s not what he meant.
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- Tom O'Rourke
- 11-14-21
Beautiful
Rereading reassures the ageing curiosity of the perpetual awareness of the longevity of understanding and observation, that lifelong learning about one's own and humanities sentient existence and the beauty in all creativity.
Tom O'Rourke 1953...? ...love always