Space just got stranger with Arthur C. Clarke’s science-fiction classic, Rendezvous with Rama. For this exquisite illustrated Folio edition, novelist John Clute provides an introduction celebrating the author’s remarkable imagination.
Cat’s Cradle
Illustrated by Joonho Ko
Introduced by Michael Dirda
It’s the end of the world as we know it … The Folio edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle features illustrations by Joonho Ko and an introduction by Michael Dirda.
£49.95
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‘One of the warmest, wisest, funniest voices to be found anywhere in fiction.’
- Daily Telegraph
Cat’s Cradle is one of Vonnegut’s greatest novels, a pitch-black, hilarious tale of the end of the world and the outrageous human mistakes that led to it. Korean artist Joonho Ko has created seven full-colour illustrations that feel like propaganda posters from another dimension: geometric in style and full of unsettling symmetry, they hold tiny crystals of dark humour.
Published the year after the Cuban missile crisis, Cat’s Cradle is the product of a world recovering from two devastating wars whilst in the midst of a new type of conflict. Vonnegut, who famously survived the bombing of Dresden by hiding in the meat locker of a slaughterhouse, was one of the great literary figures of the 20th century, and his sharp satirical novels – as funny as they are thought provoking – are postmodern classics.
This handsome collector’s edition features a slipcase blocked with a cat’s cradle pattern, and a striking binding also designed by Joonho Ko. In his exclusive introduction for this edition, Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Dirda looks at the legacy of an author who captured the conflicts and lunacy of the last century.
Bound in printed and blocked, soft touch laminated paper
Set in Minion Pro
232 pages
Frontispiece and 6 colour illustrations
Blocked slipcase
9½˝ x 6¼˝
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.
The research for John’s latest book – on the end of the world, no less – leads him to examine the complicated life of Dr Hoenikker, the so-called father of the atomic bomb. By all reports an absentminded eccentric, Hoenikker left behind one final surprise: Ice-nine, a lethal substance capable of flash-freezing all the world’s water in an instant. Now that the doctor is dead, the secret of Ice-nine has been passed to his three children, all of whom have fled to an obscure island in the Caribbean. Tangled in a cat’s cradle of love, religion, and poor decisions, John will bear witness to the final act of planet Earth. The future of the world has never been in a more precarious position…
‘My own feeling is that civilisation ended in World War I and we’re still trying to recover from that.’
- Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut was occupied with the biggest question posed by the new atomic age: once such power has been unleashed, is the end of all things inevitable? A master of approaching difficult subjects with a light touch, Vonnegut takes these foreboding concepts and tackles them with bracing satire and the kind of warm wit that makes reading about the end of the world such a pleasure. Beautifully bound and peppered with mesmerising illustrations, this is an unmissable Folio Society edition of one of Vonnegut's best.
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