The Slapstick Kurt Vonnegut Book Quiz
Test your knowledge of his life and work with our Slapstick Kurt Vonnegut Book Quiz! Kurt Vonnegut emerged as a novelist and essayist in the 1960s and penned the classic books Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions.
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The Slapstick Kurt Vonnegut Book Quiz
Results
#1. In which US State was Kurt Vonnegut born?
Unlucky! He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1922
#2. What was the title of Vonnegut’s first novel, published in 1952?
Unlucky! His debut novel was Player Piano
#3. Which of these titles was not a short story collection?
Unlucky! Between Time and Timbuktu was a 1972 TV Film based on Vonnegut’s work.
#4. Who did Vonnegut describe as the ‘worst poet alive’ ?
Unlucky! Vonnegut described Bob Dylan as the “worst poet alive. He can maybe get one good line in a song, and the rest is gibberish.”
#5. In which German city was Kurt Vonnegut held as a POW in WWII?
Unlucky! He was held as a POW in Dresden during the time the city was destroyed by Allied bombers.
#6. Billy Pilgrim is the main character in which Vonnegut novel?
Unlucky! Billy Pilgrim featured in Slaughterhouse-Five
#7. What was the title of Vonnegut’s first non-fiction collection?
Unlucky! Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloonsis is a collection of essays, reviews, short travel accounts written by Kurt Vonnegut from c. 1966–1974.
#8. Appearing in several Vonnegut novels, what was Tralfamadore?
Unlucky! Tralfamadore was a planet and appeared in many of his novels.
#9. Prior to success in his writing career, Vonnegut worked in advertising at which company?
Unlucky! He worked for General Electric
#10. His 1987 novel Bluebeard, tells the story of which fictional painter?
Unlucky! Rabo Karabekian was the artist
Best Kurt Vonnegut Books to Read
The Sirens of Titan
When Winston Niles Rumfoord flies his spaceship into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum he is converted into pure energy and only materializes when his waveforms intercept Earth or some other planet. As a result, he only gets home to Newport, Rhode Island, once every fifty-nine days and then only for an hour.
But at least, as a consolation, he now knows everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will be. He knows, for instance, that his wife is going to Mars to mate with Malachi Constant, the richest man in the world. He also knows that on Titan – one of Saturn’s moons – is an alien from the planet Tralfamadore, who has been waiting 200,000 years for a spare part for his grounded spacecraft ..
Breakfast of Champions
A satire of America, a satire of humanity itself, Breakfast Of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.
Cat’s Cradle
Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget 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. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation…
Slaughterhouse-Five
Slaughterhouse-Five is an account of Billy Pilgrim’s capture and incarceration by the Germans during the last years of World War II, and scattered throughout the narrative are episodes from Billy’s life both before and after the war, and from his travels to the planet Tralfamadore. Billy is able to move both forwards and backwards through his lifetime in an arbitrary cycle of events. Enduring the tedious life of a 1950s optometrist in Ilium, New York, he is the lover of a former pornographic movie star on the planet Tralfamadore and simultaneously an American prisoner of war (POW) in Nazi Germany.
Mother Night
Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. 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, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.
If you enjoyed our Kurt Vonnegut Book Quiz, check out our profile of The Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut
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