If You Like Kurt Vonnegut

You may also enjoy these quirky, post-modern or counter-culture novels. (Updated 9/09)

For fifty years, Kurt Vonnegut had been one of the most original and thought-provoking voices in American literature, advancing a bemused stoicism that helps us enjoy the cosmic joke underlying even the worst excesses and follies of humankind. Vonnegut's early works used many of the conventions of the Science Fiction genre, freely adapted and spoofed to support his own satiric, anti-scientific, humanist ends. his constructive, humorous and thought-provoking irony bristles through the author's frank, opinionated prose, and is essential to the author's appeal. Despite Vonnegut's bemused, self-deprecating tone – he refuses to take anything, including himself, too seriously – few readers will enjoy Vonnegut who don't sympathize with his views on life. — David Wright, Novelist

The Road to Wellville by T.C. Boyle
In 1907, Battle Creek, Michigan, is a magnet for rich seekers of health who flock to John Harvey Kellogg's health spa, where the regimen requires a change in the intestinal flora via five enemas per day. Rich with historical and imaginative details, the novel includes a romantic love story and a fierce battle between a determined father and an evil son. In this inventive and highly entertaining story, Boyle's proven talents are again displayed in rare form. Also try Drop City.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Told by the central character, Alex, this brilliant, hilarious and disturbing novel creates an alarming futuristic vision of violence, high technology and authoritarianism. Burgess' 1963 classic stands alongside Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World as a classic of 20th-century, post-industrial alienation, often shocking us into a thoughtful exploration of the meaning of free will and the conflict between good and evil.

White Apples by Jonathan Carroll
Philanderer Vincent Ettrich reawakens to discover that he has died and come back to life, thanks to the efforts of his true love, Isabelle, who is pregnant with their baby, a child that is destined to save the universe. Also try Glass Soup.

Wakefield by Andrei Codrescu
When the Devil arrives to take his soul, Wakefield, a motivational speaker and architecture buff, makes a bargain that would give him one year to search for an alternative life and embarks on a yearlong odyssey that takes him across the country, meeting New Age gurus, billionaires, techno-geeks and other characters along the way and leading to a shocking act to restore his world. Also try The Blood Countess.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (Biography)
Rather than take its place in what is now an unending queue of memoirs by people whose lives have been altered by tragic events, tough times and difficult lessons, Eggers's book starts a new line altogether, one that very few authors will be allowed to join. Which is not to say that this work is not...well, heartbreaking. You'll laugh as often as you cry, perhaps more often, and even when Eggers does focus on the grieving and sense of loss he and his siblings naturally endured, his thoughtful, introspective approach avoids navel-gazing. Also try You Shall Know Our Velocity.

Good Omens: the Nice and Accurate Prophecies by Agnes Nutter, Witch 
by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
According to the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter – the world's only totally reliable guide to the future – the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just after tea... As the forces of both Heaven and Hell anticipate the coming battle to decide the world's fate, a desperate few – including an angel with a taste for rare books, a demon in mirror-shades, the descendant of the world's most accurate prophetess, a part-time witch-finder and a dog – race against time to prevent it. Irreverently funny and unexpectedly wise, this collaboration fuses fantasy and comedy into an untrammeled romp through the latter days. Also try Gaiman’s American Gods.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he hasn't even met keep trying to kill him. Catch-22 is a microcosm of the 20th-century world as it might look to someone dangerously sane. It is a novel that lives and moves and grows with astonishing power and vitality – a masterpiece of our time.

Fluke: Or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore
Just why do humpback whales sing? That's the question that has marine behavioral biologist Nate Quinn and his crew poking, charting, recording and photographing very big, wet, gray marine mammals. Until the extraordinary day when a whale lifts its tail into the air to display a cryptic message spelled out in foot-high letters: Bite me. Naturally, this starts an adventure involving an age-old conspiracy, a megalomaniac undersea ruler and a bizarre long-distance love affair. Also try Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal.

Towing Jehovah by James Morrow
God is dead and Anthony Van Horne must tow the corpse to the Arctic (to preserve Him from sharks and decomposition). En route Van Horne must also contend with ecological guilt, a militant girlfriend, sabotage both natural and spiritual, and greedy hucksters of oil, condoms and doubtful ideas. Also try The Last Witchfinder.

The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin
Like a mad toymaker's fever dream, Rankin's uproarious book imagines a town where toys and nursery rhymes come to life: they walk, talk, eat, drink and commit heinous crimes. Jack goes to the City to find his fortune, unaware that the City is in fact Toy City, where legends and fables walk (or stumble, if they've had too much to drink). He meets up with detective teddy bear Eddie, who is investigating the murder of Humpty Dumpty. When Little Boy Blue is offed, it's clear that a serial killer is prowling Toy City, leaving behind the titular chocolate bunnies as his calling card. Also try The Witches of Chiswick and Nostradamus Ate My Hamster.

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
This story is an epic. Which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn't conclude until nine o'clock tonight [Paris time]. It is a saga, as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle. The bottle is blue, very, very old and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle is actually is the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon because it is leaking and there is only a drop of two left. Also try just about any of Robbins’ other novels, including Skinny Legs and All and Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
More than 50 years after Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe are assigned to Detachment 2702, a secret cryptographic mission, their grandchildren – Randy and Amy – join forces to create a "data haven" in the South Pacific, only to uncover a massive conspiracy with roots in Detachment 2702. Also try Quicksilver.

Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Awarded the Pulitzer Prize, A Confederacy of Dunces was not published until a decade after the death of the author. This wildly inventive and amusing novel features one of the most unforgettable characters in modern fiction: Ignatius Reilly. He's a mammoth misfit Medievalist hilariously at odds with the world of the 20th century, and his adventures take him 'way down, to New Orleans' lower depths.