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Kurt Vonnegut is a cult writer who has long been considered one of the most important and at the same time the most controversial figures in American culture. He was rewarded as often as he was ridiculed and condemned. He is part of the group of so-called "Black Humorists", Kurt Vonnegut created thought-provoking literature, outlined characters with many threads, mixed the space and time of the situations described, he also willingly drew from science fiction, played with plot and narrative forms. The following is a chronological list of the author's most famous books.

The Mechanical Piano is Vonnegut's debut novel, set in a dystopian setting. It is a sharp and brilliant satire of a man who is fascinated by the machines with which he is successively replaced. The world after the "second industrial revolution" cannot cope with the development, which he accelerated with a vengeance. Computers are beginning to dictate every aspect of human life. The protagonist of The Mechanical Piano, Paul Proteus, who comes from the medical caste and is never replaced by machines, joins the rebellion. The struggle to restore the old order begins. In The Mechanical Piano, the author skillfully quotes the truth through a dense sieve of irony.

"Cat's Cradle" is a fatalistic literature. Here the reader is confronted with a vision of the end of the world, a declared religion based mainly on the lies of Bokonism. The apocalypse should come not because of the wrath of God, but because of the scientist Felix Hoenikker, who took possession of a substance called ice-9. Ice-9 is dangerous enough to destroy humanity. The name of the book "Cat's Cradle" - comes from the way you wind threads around your fingers for pleasure. Hoenikker spent time with this entertainment on the day when the world was plunged into chaos after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Honikker is a cynical servant, a brilliant chemist, and an unscrupulous man. After his death, ice-9 falls into the wrong hands, or rather, his three children. In "Cat's Cradle" lies triumph, everything seems to be a useless hoax, because the truth has long ceased to be attractive. There is also the specter of the belief that eventually every invention will become a weapon against humanity.

The protagonist of "Slaughterhouse ..." Billy Pilgrim survived the bombing of Dresden and was captured in a German prisoner of war camp. After the war, he returns home and starts a family. He gets into a car accident that changes his ordinary life once and for all. From that moment on, Billy gets into a flying saucer and begins to time travel through his life. During one of these trips, he even ends up in a zoo on a planet with the mysterious name Tralfamador. Slaughterhouse Five... refers to anti-war novels. It repeats postulates about the senselessness and cruelty of war; people die in war, terrible crimes are committed, and war is the state of a sick soul.

In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut engages the reader in a critical anti-American story that encourages reflection on the value of a person, comprehend and objectify it. The protagonist of Breakfast of Champions is an elderly, embittered, and underappreciated science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout, who makes a living by installing windows. One day, a man receives (as he thinks, because of a cruel joke) an invitation to an art festival. Intrigued, but also eager to boycott the event, he gets into his car and travels around the United States, getting there with some trouble. Breakfast of Champions is full of different, often unrelated themes.

Kilgore Trout was the alter ego of the author who died in the pages of Timequake in 1997 at the age of 84. Vonnegut was the same age at the time of his death. The novel was filmed in 1999 by director Alan Rudolph. Breakfast of Champions starred Albert Finney, Bruce Willis and Nick Nolte.

Bluebeard is a comedy of errors, a book within a book filled with dark humor, a form of Vonnegut's fictional autobiography that ends up parodying it. The protagonist of Rabo Karabekyan is a character for whom the storage of potatoes is the most important thing. The key to it is kept in the greatest possible holiness. No one knows what is hidden in the mysterious little building, and this causes an explosion of various speculations. A whole story is built around the potato cache, telling about the extraordinary life of ordinary people.

All books by the author

She is a postmodernist, a new generation of literary engineer, framing works of incredible surreal forms with the ease of an illusionist. Not everyone is yet able to appreciate the subtlety of her humor and the depth of her reflective play. I had to read reviews like: "I was looking for a female novel, but I got metafiction, it's all too complicated." Is it really difficult?

"Throwing in the Clouds" is a delightful example of lively, vivid, intelligent metafiction. The word looks scary, needs some explanation. Metafiction (not to be confused with metanarrative) is a special case of postmodernism, which is characterized by a violation of the boundaries between the inner world of the work and the real world of the “author on paper”. The author here is not impersonal, not hidden from the eyes of the reader, he clearly speaks of his presence, can criticize his characters, change the plot at will or his own, or one of his characters. The author himself admits that his whole book is fiction, even if there is truth in it. Why, then, read it, if there is no chance to believe in its authenticity? Then, that the theme of metafiction is the very event of "telling", and not the story itself. The process of reading becomes a goal - it is exciting, unpredictable, it involves the reader in events. The reader is no longer a third person, he is a participant in the multidimensional world created by the author. Again. Metaprose was created not for the sake of the story itself, but for the sake of the process of storytelling, and subsequently - reading.

What do we have in "Soaring". The story is told in the first person - the author under the guise of the main character Effy. The fact that this is the author is hinted at by some parallels with Kate's life - studying at the same university, specialization and similar trifles. However, this does not make Effie a Kate and vice versa, they are not identical. It just means that Effy's mask was chosen by Kate for herself in this novel.

The first level of the narrative is Effy's conversation with her mother. They live on an island and tell each other stories - Effy tells her mother about her life while studying at the university, mother tells Effy about their family. This is the second level of the story. A story about Madame Astarte, which Effy writes, is periodically wedged into all this. This is the third level of the story. There are actually more, but these three are the most significant.

What happens in simple terms? The author tells the story of Effie, who tells the story of the self who writes the story of Madame Astarte. It's a book within a book within a book and it's amazingly entertaining. The whole world of this book is a game construct that Kate changes in the manner of a Rubik's Cube. If suddenly the narrative, in the opinion of one of her characters, has reached a dead end, she changes it. More precisely, it is not Kate herself who changes it, but Effi-Kate - “the author on paper”. It looks incredibly organic within the framework of postmodern literature. There is a mention in the text that “I have postmodernism here, which means I can write as I please.” And since it’s not what is written that comes to the fore, but how it is written, we evaluate it primarily by the style of narration. And he has no complaints.

There are quite a lot of characters in the book, all of them are given with a brief but very characteristic description. A gloomy American who loves dogs more than people. A guy hanging on the grass, repeating the behavior model of a seal. An elderly professor playing word games. A feminist girl who doesn't wear a bra. A detective in an old Ford Cortina with a year's supply of cigarettes. And so on, and so on, and so on. The images are bright, they do not get lost in the crowd, despite the fact that they themselves create it.

Also pleasant is the abundance of allusions - references to literary works. The most obvious - to Shakespeare's "The Tempest" - is a bit like Joyce's trick in "Ulysses", when the whole story is built on the model of an already existing classic. And it's amazingly interesting too.

But one should not think that metafiction - the play of the author with characters and readers - is an achievement of the twentieth century. Metaprose existed long before, although it was never called that. At the beginning of the 17th century, readers of high society were shocked by Cervantes' book on Don Quixote of La Mancha. First of all, of course, by the fact that all of it from the first letter to the last is a parody of a chivalric romance that was fashionable at that time. But also by the fact that the author does not hesitate to talk to the reader on the pages of his book, he discusses his characters, condemns and justifies them. And most importantly, in the second volume, he introduces his own book into the universe of Don Quixote! And this is pure metafiction.

The bottom line is this. "Throwing in the Clouds" is an example of chic modern entertainment literature. This is not a miserable banal women's novel, not a literary treatise, there are no dramatic stories that will certainly evoke a response from sympathetic hearts. This is the next gen in literature - a new generation of prose. It requires the reader to have intelligence and erudition. It's funny, reminiscent of Woody Allen and his short stories. But since she has more demands, then she is able to give much more than the elegance of a hedgehog, for example. And by the way, everything that is written on this page is not true.