Recommendations
Books Like Slaughterhouse-Five
What to read after Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is the anti-war novel of the Vietnam era — Billy Pilgrim unstuck in time, the firebombing of Dresden, 'So it goes.' If you were drawn to its formal invention, its refusal of conventional narrative, and its understanding that some experiences can only be approached obliquely, these novels will find you in the same place.
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Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut are the two great satirical anti-war novelists of postwar American fiction; Catch-22 (1961) came first and is longer and more conventionally structured; reading the two together reveals how different approaches to the same subject — the absurdity of war — can produce very different but equally lasting books
- 2Buy
Cat's Cradle
by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut's satirical novel of science, religion, and the end of the world — the companion piece to Slaughterhouse-Five in his career; looser and funnier in tone, but equally interested in the question of what human beings do with the knowledge that they can destroy everything
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Mother Night
by Kurt Vonnegut
An American spy in Nazi Germany who poses as a propagandist — Vonnegut's darkest novel and the most concentrated expression of his World War Two experience outside Slaughterhouse-Five; shorter, without the time-travel structure, but the same moral seriousness
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All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
Paul Bäumer on the German Western Front in World War One — not satirical and not formally inventive, but the foundational literary account of what war does to young men, and the book that Vonnegut's generation grew up reading and that made Slaughterhouse-Five necessary
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The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
O'Brien and Vonnegut are asking the same question about fiction and trauma — can you tell the truth about something by making up stories about it? O'Brien says yes, and structures his Vietnam memoir around that answer in the same way Vonnegut structures Slaughterhouse-Five
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Breakfast of Champions
by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut's strangest and most formally experimental novel — the meeting of Kilgore Trout (a recurring Vonnegut character) and Dwayne Hoover, a Pontiac dealer in Midland City who reads one of Trout's stories and goes insane; for readers who loved Slaughterhouse-Five and want more Vonnegut at his most idiosyncratic
- 7Buy
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
The devil in 1930s Soviet Moscow — Bulgakov and Vonnegut share the use of the fantastic to approach what realistic fiction cannot contain; both novels are formally inventive, very funny, and about something terrible
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
The Buendía family across a century in Macondo — García Márquez is doing something similar to Vonnegut with time: the novel's characters cannot escape their past, and the narrative structure reflects that; the other great twentieth-century novel that treats time as something to be reorganized rather than followed
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