Kurt Vonnegut has 35 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 46 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 1,007 ratings. The most-rated is Slaughterhouse-Five.
Slaughterhouse-Five
Summary
Slaughterhouse-Five is the now famous parable of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran and POW who has, in the later stage of his life, become "unstuck in time" and who experiences at will (or unwillingly) all known events of his chronology out of order and sometimes simultaneously. 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). The "unstuck" nature of Pilgrim's experience may constitute an early novelistic use of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder; then again, Pilgrim's aliens may be as "real" as Dresden is real to him. Struggling to find some purpose, order, or meaning to his existence and humanity's, Pilgrim meets the beauteous and mysterious Montana Wildhack (certainly the author's best character name), has a child with her, and drifts on some supernal plane, finally, in which Kilgore Trout, the Tralfamadorians, Montana Wildhack, and the ruins of Dresden do not merge but rather disperse through all planes of existence. Slaughterhouse-Five was hugely successful, brought Vonnegut an enormous audience, was a finalist for the National Book Award and a best seller, and remains four decades later as timeless and shattering a war fiction as Catch-22, with which it stands as the two signal novels of their riotous and furious decade.
©1969 Kurt Vonnegut (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
Breakfast of Champions
Summary
Audie Award Finalist, Best Male Narrator, 2016 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. The core of the novel is Kilgore Trout, a familiar character very deliberately modeled on the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985), a fact that Vonnegut conceded frequently in interviews and that was based upon his own occasional relationship with Sturgeon. Here Kilgore Trout is an itinerant wandering from one science fiction convention to another; he intersects with the protagonist, Dwayne Hoover (one of Vonnegut's typically boosterish, lost, and stupid mid-American characters), and their intersection is the excuse for the evocation of many others, familiar and unfamiliar, dredged from Vonnegut's gallery. The central issue is concerned with intersecting and apposite views of reality, and much of the narrative is filtered through Trout, who is neither certifiably insane nor a visionary writer but can pass for either depending upon Dwayne Hoover's (and Vonnegut's) view of the situation. America, when this novel was published, was in the throes of Nixon, Watergate, and the unraveling of our intervention in Vietnam; the nation was beginning to fragment ideologically and geographically, and Vonnegut sought to cram all of this dysfunction (and a goofy, desperate kind of hope, the irrational comfort given through the genre of science fiction) into a sprawling narrative whose sense, if any, is situational, not conceptual. Reviews were polarized; the novel was celebrated for its bizarre aspects and became the basis of a Bruce Willis movie adaptation whose reviews were not nearly so polarized. (Most critics hated it.) PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.
©1973 Kurt Vonnegut (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
The Sirens of Titan
Summary
The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. 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 and a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell. As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Kurt Vonnegut's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Gay Talese about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.
©1959 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (P)2008 Audible, Inc.
Galapagos
Summary
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. As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Kurt Vonnegut's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Gay Talese about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.
©1985 Kurt Vonnegut (P)2008 Audible, Inc.
The Lone Drow
Summary
Alone on the battlefield. Surrounded by death. Cornered by enemies. And ready to die. Drizzt Do’Urden has become the Hunter, the bane of the orc hordes still ravaging the North. Cut off, alone, convinced that everything he ever valued has been destroyed, all that’s left is to kill, and kill, and kill, until there are no enemies left. But there are a lot of enemies, and even the Hunter is just one lone drow.
©2003 Wizards of the Coast, Inc. (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Hocus Pocus
Summary
Eugene Debs Hartke (named after the famous early 20th century Socialist working class leader) 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. Debs (and Vonnegut) see academia just as imprisoning as the corrupt penal system and they regard politics as the furnishing and marketing of lies. Debs, already disillusioned by circumstance, quickly tracks his way toward resignation and then fury. As warden and prisoner, Debs (and the reader) come to understand that the roles are interchangeable; as a professor jailed for "radical" statements in the classroom reported by a reactionary student, he comes to see the folly of all regulation. The "hocus pocus" of the novel's title does not describe only the jolting reversals and seemingly motiveless circumstance which attend Debs' disillusion and suffering, but also describe the political, social, and economic system of a country built upon can't, and upon the franchising of lies. At 68, Vonnegut had not only abandoned the sentiment and cracked optimism manifest in Slaughterhouse-Five, he had abandoned any belief in the system or faith for its recovery. This novel is another in a long series of farewells to the farmland funeral rites of childhood.
©1990 Kurt Vonnegut (P)2015 Audible Inc.
The Mountain Between Us
Summary
On a stormy winter night, two strangers wait for a flight at the Salt Lake City airport. Ashley Knox is an attractive, successful writer, who is flying East for her much anticipated wedding. Dr. Ben Payne has just wrapped up a medical conference and is also eager to get back East for a slate of surgeries he has scheduled for the following day. When the last outgoing flight is cancelled due to a broken de-icer and a forthcoming storm, Ben finds a charter plane that can take him around the storm and drop him in Denver to catch a connection. And when the pilot says the single engine prop plane can fit one more, if barely, Ben offers the seat to Ashley, knowing that she needs to get back just as urgently. And then the unthinkable happens. The pilot has a heart attack mid-flight, and the plane crashes into the High Uintas Wilderness - one of the largest stretches of harsh and remote land in the United States. Ben, who has broken ribs and Ashley, who suffers a terrible leg fracture, along with the pilot's dog, are faced with an incredibly harrowing battle to survive. Fortunately, Ben is a medical professional and avid climber. With little hope for rescue, he must nurse Ashley back to health and figure out how they are going to get off the mountain, where the temperature hovers in the teens. Meanwhile, Ashley soon realizes that the very private Ben has some serious emotional wounds to heal as well. He explains to Ashley that he is separated from his beloved wife, but in a long standing tradition, he faithfully records messages for her on his voice recorder, reflecting on their love affair. As Ashley eavesdrops on Ben's tender words to his estranged wife she comes to fear that when it comes to her own love story, she's just settling. And what's more: she begins to realize that the man she is really attracted to, the man she may love, is Ben.
©2010 Charles Martin (P)2010 Random House
Mother Night
Summary
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. As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Kurt Vonnegut's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Gay Talese about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.
©1966 Kurt Vonnegut (P)2008 Audible, Inc.
Cat's Cradle
Summary
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.
©1963 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr (P)2007 HarperCollins Publishers
Blowback
Summary
When a mysterious new weapon tips the balance against American and allied forces throughout the Middle East, the only person the president can call for help is the man the administration has just fired: Navy SEAL turned covert Homeland Security operative, Scot Harvath. Caught live on Al Jazeera in an off-the-books operation, Harvath is forced to go to ground, as a senator with presidential aspirations turns her sights on the White House and forces President Jack Rutledge to publicly end the career of America's number-one counter-terrorism operative. But when the tide in the war against terror suddenly turns against the West, the president has no choice but to bring Harvath back inside. Ducking a congressional subpoena, Harvath travels to Cyprus where he learns about a weapon called The Sword of Allah, which terrorists intend to use to rid all Muslim lands of Western infidels. As the layers of truth unfold, Harvath is witness to realities more menacing than he ever could have imagined and must rely solely on his instincts to confront a new evil closing in on the United States. With his characteristic precision in describing military technology, high-voltage action, and sweeping international sensibility, Brad Thor has created another supercharged novel that is sure to thrill.
©2005 Brad Thor (P)2005 Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Player Piano
Summary
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. As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Kurt Vonnegut's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Gay Talese about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.
©1980 Kurt Vonnegut (P)2008 Audible, Inc.
If This Isn't Nice, What Is?
Summary
Master storyteller and satirist Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most in-demand commencement speakers of his time. For each occasion, Vonnegut’s words were unfailingly unique, insightful, and witty, and they stayed with audience members long after graduation. As edited by Dan Wakefield, this book reads like a narrative in the unique voice that made Vonnegut a hero to readers and listeners of all ages. At times hilarious, razor-sharp, freewheeling, and deeply serious, these reflections are ideal for anyone undergoing what Vonnegut would call their "long-delayed puberty ceremony" - marking the passage from student to full-time adult. This book makes the perfect gift for high school or college graduates - or for parents and grandparents who remember Vonnegut fondly and want to connect with him in a new context.
©2013 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Copyright Trust (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
The Little Prince
Summary
Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, translated by Michael Morpurgo. Read by Richard E. Grant, with an introduction read by Michael Morpurgo. If a little fellow comes along, if he laughs, if he has golden hair, and if he never answers questions, then you will know who he is. He is the Little Prince, the mysterious, innocent and beautiful boy who appears to a pilot stranded in the desert and makes an extraordinary request. He has captured the hearts of millions around the world since his story first appeared in 1943, written down by an aristocratic French aviator who soon after disappeared during a flight across the sea. The Little Prince journeys to our planet from his home among the stars, encountering all sorts of benighted grown-ups along the way, and a fox, who teaches him how to see the important things in life. But the Prince has left behind a flower growing on his star, a rose which is his treasure and his burden, and before long he must return to it. Master storyteller Michael Morpurgo, author of War Horse, has translated what is for him 'one of the greatest stories ever written' so that more English readers might discover the joy of reading this enchanting fable. The Little Prince is a story for everyone, for children and grown-up children, for kings, geographers and lamp-lighters, even for the very serious and the very wise.
©1943 Antoine de Saint-Exupery (P)2018 Random House Audiobooks
Bluebeard
Summary
Bluebeard, published in 1987, is Vonnegut's meditation on art, artists, surrealism, and disaster. 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, which are heavy with women, painting, artistic ambition, artistic fraudulence, and as of yet unknown consequence. Vonnegut's intention here is not so much satirical (although the contemporary art scene would be easy enough to deconstruct), nor is it documentary (although Karabekian does carry elements of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko). Instead Vonnegut is using art for the same purpose he used science fiction clichés in Slaughterhouse-Five: as a filter through which he can illuminate the savagery, cruelty, and essentially comic misdirection of human existence. Listeners will recognize familiar Vonnegut character types and archetypes as they drift in and out through the background; meanwhile Karabekian, betrayed and betrayer, sinks through a bottomless haze of recollection. Like most of Vonnegut's late works, this is both science fiction and cruel, contemporary realism at once, using science fiction as metaphor for human damage as well as failure to perceive. Listeners will find that Vonnegut's protagonists can never really clarify for us whether they are ultimately unwitting victims or simple barbarians, leaving it up to the listener to determine in which genre this audiobook really fits, if any at all.
©1987 Kurt Vonnegut (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
Welcome to the Monkey House
Summary
Kurt Vonnegut is a master of contemporary American Literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as a "true artist" ( The New York Times) with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He is, as Graham Greene has declared, "one of the best living American writers". 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.
©1950 -1968 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (P)2006 HarperCollins Publishers
Shelter for Quinn
Summary
Having grown up with a port-wine birthmark on her face and neck, Quinn Dixon’s heard them all. Her own mother couldn’t bear to touch her, let alone strangers. Years of stares and insults from everyone from classmates to foster families have made her understandably reluctant to trust. So when John comes along, of course he couldn’t be interested in more than a brief affair. He’ll get sick of all the gawking and whispers soon enough and leave her…just like everyone else. John “Driftwood” Trettle was captivated by Quinn the moment they met. After months of skirting around their attraction, one pivotal evening finds John seizing the reins and refusing to be denied a chance to prove he’s worthy of Quinn’s time, her trust, and her love. To show her he’ll have her back, always, and defend her against anyone cruel or stupid enough to hurt his woman. But he can’t protect against an unknown threat. Even if it wears a familiar face....
©2019 Susan Stoker (P)2019 Susan Stoker
Timequake
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.
©1997 Kurt Vonnegut (P)2015 Macmillan Audio
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Summary
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. As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Kurt Vonnegut's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Gay Talese about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.
©1965 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (P)2008 Audible, Inc.
Jailbird
Summary
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). In that sense, Starbuck is a generic Vonnegut protagonist, an individual compromised by the essential lack of an interior. Jailbird (1979) uses the format of the memoir to retrospectively trace Starbuck's uneven, centerless, and purposeless odyssey in or out of the offices of power. He represents another Vonnegut Everyman caught amongst forces he neither understands nor can defend. Written in the aftermath of Watergate, Jailbird is, of course, an attempt to order those catastrophic events and to find some rationale or meaningful outcome, and, as is usually the case with Vonnegut's pyrotechnics, there is no easy answer, or perhaps there is no answer at all. Starbuck (his name an Americanized version of his long, foreign birth name), in his profound ambiguity and ambivalence, may himself constitute an explanation for Watergate, a series of whose consequences have not, decades later, been fully assimilated or understood. The Nixon who passes across the panorama of Jailbird is no more or less ambiguous than Starbuck himself - a man without qualities whose overwhelming quality is one of imposition.
©1979 Kurt Vonnegut (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
Return of the Asgard
Summary
The Valkyrie Kara stood alone against the Ragnarok horde on Earth to ensure that the Asgard race and Valhalla could escape. For 5,000 years she has fought and evaded the Ragnarok race on Earth, just waiting for her people to return. A human woman, Kate, joins her fight, showing as much conviction and valor as any Valkyrie. Their friendship quickly becomes something more as they hold the line on Earth in battle, to herald the return of the Asgard.
©2013 Erik Schubach (P)2014 Erik Schubach