Editions

Hocus Pocus

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099877103

  • Length: 288  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 18mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 202g

  • RRP: £9.99

Hocus Pocus

'Although it is set in the near future, Hocus Pocus is the most topical, realistic Vonnegut novel to date, and shows the struggle of an artist a little impatient with allegory and more than a little impatient with his own country' - New York Times Book Review

Some get all the luck – but not Eugene Debs Hartke. Ex-Vietnam vet, ex-college professor, and now a TB-stricken inmate at Tarkington State Reformatory, his life has been warped by one ludicrous farce after another. Here, on scraps of paper pilfered from the prison library, he recounts his own story for posterity, revealing the hypocrisy and injustices of a world that just doesn’t want him to thrive.

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099877103

  • Length: 288  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 18mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 202g

  • RRP: £9.99

Reviews

  • Although it is set in the near future, Hocus Pocus is the most topical, realistic Vonnegut novel to date, and shows the struggle of an artist a little impatient with allegory and more than a little impatient with his own country

    New York Times Book Review

  • Vonnegut's best novel in years-funny and prophetic...something special

    The Nation

  • Hocus Pocus is, of course, extremely funny. Jokes are told, deadpan and whiplash-sharp; neat, compulsive little anecdotes with stings in the tail jostle one another down the page

    Sunday Correspondent

  • "It is all done with voice. Vonnegut is a master of the first-person, manic-depressive stand-up"

    Observer

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About the Author

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. An army intelligence scout during the Second World War, he was captured by the Germans and witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. After the war he worked as a police reporter, an advertising copywriter and a public relations man for General Electric. His first novel Player Piano (1952) achieved underground success. Cat's Cradle (1963) was hailed by Graham Greene as 'one of the best novels of the year by one of the ablest living authors'. His eighth book, Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969 and was a literary and commercial success, and was made into a film in 1972. Vonnegut is the author of thirteen other novels, three collections of stories and five non-fiction books. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.

Kurt Vonnegut

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