A collection of autobiographical writings by the most zanily imaginative and brilliantly barking commentator of the post-war era

"An American cultural hero celebrated for his wry, loonily imaginative commentary on war, apocalypse, technology, materialism and other afflictions... One of the last of a generation of great American novelists of World War II" Los Angeles Times "Like listening to the monologue of an interesting man whose tongue has been loosened by just one glass of wine" Guardian "Fates Worse Than Death is honest and scarily funny, and it offers a rare insight into an author who has customarily hidden his heart" New York Times "A truly great work of moral philosophy" The Age "Fates Worse Than Death is the latest volume of his cunning, rambling, edgy sermonettes, his wry, moral bomblets chucked night after night from podium and pulpit into gatherings of shrinks and museologists, Anglicans, architects, MIT graduands and the like. Rumours that the old boy was losing his knack of drilling straight into the nerve of western complacency can, on the evidence of this marvellously tetchy wit, be discounted." Observer

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During the Second World War he served in Europe and, as a prisoner of war in Germany, witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired Slaughterhouse-Five. He is the author of fourteen novels, seven collections of stories and five non-fiction books. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.