“... to be promised by this section is an internal contradiction with a beneficially bracing effect. Kurt Vonnegut pursues a similar strategy in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), where a thought experiment about time clashes richly with one of the book’s core assumptions. Vonnegut’s experience of the firebombing of ...”

“... novelists from Henry Miller (‘I don’t care whether he’s a Fascist … he can write’) to Kurt Vonnegut (‘every writer is in his debt’) to Philip Roth (‘Céline is my Proust!’) have declared their loyalty to his radical voice. Normance was probably unknown to these writers, but its style and ambitions would be largely familiar. We need ...”

“... graduation robes?’ The narrator sounds like a college student giving a commencement address, or Kurt Vonnegut without the jokes: a voice assuming a certain wisdom. Later in Continent, Crace tells the story of an elderly calligrapher and explains the old man’s careful procedures: ‘He is seeking beauty of the highest intellectual order, the most ...”

“... and sententious slogans in the latrines – are as bleakly funny as anything in Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut. The book is driven by the attempt to understand something beyond ordinary comprehension, by Levi’s constant sense, as he later explained to his German translator, of ‘a painful void, a puncture, a permanent stimulus that insists on being ...”

“... reminds us of nothing so much as a Japanese Vicar of Bray. Richard Yates has been hailed, by Kurt Vonnegut and others, as the chronicler of the generation of middle-class Americans who came of age on the battlefields of Europe in the closing stages of World War Two. In Revolutionary Road (first published in 1961) and his new novel Young Hearts ...”

“... but Wonderland’s brand of Science Fiction owes more to the winning cartoonism of Kurt Vonnegut (touched perhaps by Raymond Roussel’s delight in deliriously over-elaborate explanations) than to the dirty cyberpunk realism of Sterling and William Gibson. Similarly, Murakami’s fantasy narrative is more reminiscent of the elegant ...”

“... Law School, has worked on Monocle and the New York Times, and became editor of the Nation in 1978. Kurt Vonnegut, E.L. Doctorow, Studs Terkel and Tom Wicker are among the admirers quoted on the dust-jacket; and, as if that weren’t enough, Navasky himself twinkles out on the back flap in a checked open-neck shirt, a beard, wiry glasses, and an ...”

“... Barth, William Gass, John Hawkes, Stanley Elkin, William Gaddis, Robert Coover, Walter Abish and Kurt Vonnegut. Sontag was the only woman writer invited, Pynchon the only writer not to turn up. Vonnegut’s wife, the photographer Jill Krementz, recorded the event for posterity. On the other hand, the final words of ...”

“... Dickens and Huysmans to Lampedusa have given us set-piece descriptions of elaborate meals, and Kurt Vonnegut has recently (in Deadeye Dick) done us the courtesy of providing a few exotic recipes. But not till The Antarctica Cookbook, as far as I know, has there been a novel whose fictional resources were exclusively directed to the introduction of a ...”

“... Gerard Woodward’s second collection, After the Deafening, suggests that we see him as a poetic Kurt Vonnegut who is writing ‘the science fiction of everyday life’. This analogy is not too far-fetched. The poem ‘Your Shell-Likes’ actually mirrors the repeated single command ‘Listen’ used throughout Slaughterhouse-Five and these poems, like ...”

“... isn’t proud of them.) It uses the voice of a disgruntled, detached Tokyo hipster, self-raised on Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Chandler and Dostoevsky, to tell an unlikely noir story: a nameless Boku goes in search of an old friend and a mysterious sheep on the orders of a shadowy tycoon. It’s a consciously Chandleresque set-up, which, in Murakami’s ...”

“... an anti-semitic tirade. With Revolutionary Road, many of his contemporaries – including Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron – felt that he did something comparable for an entire generation; that he saw the cracks in the 1950s. In 1956, William H. Whyte Jr, a Fortune magazine journalist and Max Weber fan, published The Organisation Man, his ...”

“... Van’s. The core included Vogel, Puzo, Friedman, Brooks and the screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. Kurt Vonnegut began to show up. Peter Matthiessen was considered but rejected for mentioning too often his membership in the Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘It’s an organisation,’ Puzo said, ‘for guys who can’t get screen deals.’ Barring ...”

“... close dialogue, and favoured the em dash (otherwise known as the French dash or ‘tiret long’). Kurt Vonnegut abhorred semicolons, describing them as ‘transvestite hermaphrodites’ that served only to advertise the user’s advanced education. He made avoiding them not just one of his tips for writers, but the first on the list.Why should a full ...”

“... missteps leading to the First World War, it was also able to attract support from Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, Chester Bowles and John F. Kennedy. The right wing of the organisation was awash with antisemitism and Charles Lindbergh worship, but most of its followers eventually accepted the task of defeating Nazism. Arriving at Yale after ...”