The Vonnegut Review

a telegraphic schizophrenic journey through Vonnegut's novels

[thevonnegutreview]

We love Scott Palazzo’s beautiful, Slaughterhouse-inspired artwork, “Someplace in Time”! Using over 500 individual watercolor cells, Palazzo animates one of the most inspiring and haunting passages from Vonnegut’s masterpiece. Enjoy!

And read our essay on Slaughterhouse-Five: “Oscillating to Eternity: Apocalypse and Eden in Vonnegut’s Telegraphic Schizophrenic Novel.”

[millionsmillions]

When Kurt Vonnegut wasn’t writing, he was drawing. “The making of pictures is to writing what laughing gas is to the Asian influenza,” he said. The New Yorker has a slideshow of 10 of his cubist sketches. You can find more of his doodles in the new book Kurt Vonnegut Drawings.

[thevonnegutreview]

The Vonnegut Review

[theparisreview]

Kurt Vonnegut reads from Slaughterhouse-Five. (via)

[thevonnegutreview]

The #VonnegutSummer may be over, but The Vonnegut Review is alive and well. We've just penned a review of Robert Tally's marvelous new theoretical take on Vonnegut. Here's a snippet:

Vonnegut’s “telegraphic schizophrenic novel,” then, offers a resolute defense of the human even as it deconstructs the notion of the self. What Vonnegut returns to, in his exploration of eternal recurrence and Tralfamadorian ethics, is what Nietzsche refers to as amor fati, or the love of fate. Amidst the terror of history and the trauma of war, Vonnegut, yearning to recover a lost wholeness, shores up the ruins of modernity in the fragments of narrative.

Click here to read the whole review at The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Be sure to follow The Vonnegut Review on twitter here.

[thevonnegutreview]

From Buzzfeed's list, "28 Beautiful Quotes About Libraries"

Photo: New York Public Library

[behappyyplease]

[thefathersmaysoar]

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have. What occurs to most people when they read Kurt is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Fancy that.

Mark Vonnegut (on Kurt Vonnegut in Armageddon in Retrospect).  (via callumcanreadandwrite)

[michelle-andthediamonds]

Do you realize that all great literature- are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being?

(Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?)

-Kurt Vonnegut

(via michelle-andthediamonds)

[homework-hmwrk-blog]

[desperatelypleasant]

Venus on the Half-Shell

"Kilgore Trout," Dell, 1975.

Actually written by Philip Jose Farmer. Strangely kind of great.

[sadbadbabes]

It’s the small things in life. #cafeladro #goodmorning #slaughterhousefive #vonnegut

[theparisreview]

Listen to Kurt Vonnegut’s first public reading of Breakfast of Champions, three years before it was published, here.

[thevonnegutreview]

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two. I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. ... Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions, 1975

[theparisreview]

“There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.”

Kurt Vonnegut (via theparisreview)

[thefathersmaysoar]

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have. What occurs to most people when they read Kurt is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Fancy that.

Mark Vonnegut (on Kurt Vonnegut in Armageddon in Retrospect).  (via callumcanreadandwrite)

[carbiv0re]

1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

Kurt Vonnegut (via mynamesnotjonas)

[the-first-sentences]

As a kid I was the youngest member of my family, and the youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation.