Breakfast of Champions

Dwayne Hoover is a Pontiac dealer in Midland City, Indiana. He is about to go insane. Kilgore Trout is a forgotten science fiction writer whose books are only sold in pornography shops. He is about to meet Dwayne Hoover. And Kurt Vonnegut — who makes a personal appearance in his own novel — is about to dismantle the entire machinery of American fiction, explain how it works, and show you what it has been doing to all of us.

Breakfast of Champions is the most formally radical thing Vonnegut ever wrote: a novel illustrated with his own stick drawings, full of authorial intrusions, and dedicated to the explicit project of examining why the stories we tell shape the society we live in. It is also very, very funny. And underneath the comedy there is something genuinely angry — about American racism, about consumerism, about the violence and emptiness and waste of the richest society in human history.

Essential Vonnegut. Essential American literature. A novel that is impossible to read without laughing and impossible to finish without thinking. Published by Vintage.