A posthumous double volume of the influential author's first and last written works, published to coincide with the 90th anniversary of his birth, includes the bitter satire Basic training and the unfinished final novel If God were alive today.

Aging science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.

Second only to Slaughterhouse-Five of Vonnegut's canon in its prominence and influence, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) presents Eliot Rosewater, an itinerant, semi-crazed millionaire wandering the country in search of heritage and philanthropic outcome, introducing the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout to the world and Vonnegut to the collegiate audience which would soon make him a cult writer. Trout, modeled according to Vonnegut on the science...

"Flying to a favorite uncle's funeral in Indianapolis, middle-aged Kurt Vonnegut daydreams of one-hundred-year-old Wilbur Oriole-11 Swain, pediatrician and past United States President, who wrote history's most popular child-rearing manual and sold the original Louisiana Purchase."--NoveList viewed in Sept. 2007.

A volume of fourteen early and previously unpublished short works offers insight into the social satirist's developing literary style and includes pieces that explore such themes as innocence, ironic twists of fate, and morality.

Vonnegut's first novel, an unforgiving portrait of an automated and totalitarian future, was published in 1952. A human revolt against the machines which control life was arranged by the machines themselves to prove the futility of such resistance. Visionary and unrelenting, this is felt by some critics to be Vonnegut's best and most original novel.

"Broad humor and bitter irony collide in this fictional autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, who, at age seventy-one, wants to be left alone on his Long Island estate with the secret he has locked inside his potato barn. But then a voluptuous young widow badgers Rabo into telling his life story-and Vonnegut in turn tells us the plain, heart-hammering truth about man's careless fancy to create or destroy what he loves."--Amazon.

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? Truth and justice are blurred in this brilliant satire rife with true gallows humor. Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.

Dwayne Hoover, a successful automobile dealer, suddenly decides that he is a machine and begins to act accordingly.

Second only to Slaughterhouse-Five of Vonnegut's canon in its prominence and influence, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) presents Eliot Rosewater, an itinerant, semi-crazed millionaire wandering the country in search of heritage and philanthropic outcome, introducing the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout to the world and Vonnegut to the collegiate audience which would soon make him a cult writer.

Trout, modeled according to

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