Galapagos » (Reissue)

Kurt Vonnegut was forever established in the literary pantheon and on the school syllabus with the publication of his brilliant antiwar novel Slaughterhouse-Five, but he endured as a purveyor of mind-warping, surreal fiction that just so happened to be funny.

A small group of apocalypse survivors stranded on the Galapagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave new human race. "Vonnegut is a post-modern Mark Train. . . . Galapagos is a madcap genealogical adventure".--New York Times Book Review.

The New York Times - Lorrie Moore

Although certainly the novel has something to do with the giant crush America has on celebrity, the famous people never really do make it into the story, and what we end up with is a madcap genealogical adventure - a blend of the Old Testament, the Latin American novel and a lot of cut-up comic books - employing a cast of lesser-knowns that includes a schoolteacher named Mary Hepburn, an Ecuadorean sea captain named von Kleist, a former male prostitute named James Wait (whose skin color is ''like the crust on a pie in a cheap cafeteria''), a dog named Kazakh (who, ''thanks to surgery and training, had virtually no personality''), plus a narrator who turns out to be none other than the son of Kilgore Trout, that science fiction hack from Mr. Vonnegut's earlier books.