Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Wednesday, March 1 if you spend $25 on items shipped by Amazon

Or fastest delivery February 22 - 24

[{"displayPrice":"$8.99","priceAmount":8.99,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"8","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"99","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"be3yTbBfl1J06MX%2FrgFkLJMtYGHyvtMVTHGFOlk4%2FIK0PC208wIltTxSMDkygUS3QBOHO%2B1Y6i%2BfiQ%2ByfMUJKWE3G4G89GQ995%2FUuEWo6Uwm3lsGpQFLEgZN%2FzImAFYDGuLXPUi%2BAo4%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW"},{"displayPrice":"$7.72","priceAmount":7.72,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"7","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"72","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"HSCxyaw%2FY8CR%2BFferxNQJTnyAjtqSEi3HfIfUwG1IQm8Frl6Zrm74xkDNuUAhTdU9RbbeeIl7Lu5okDr5EJyRcE3QrErWME4a6gMi5n8Pzw5Qveal2Sv4ixotINGuruKmtE9ehoUEtzIEHxQvcX2gW%2F8nlqRgVbWkuSzcpJlOISV6xZUipIBuMLSf%2FlhE8DV","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED"}]

$$8.99 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Secure transaction

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Return policy: Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

FREE delivery Saturday, February 4 if you spend $25 on items shipped by Amazon

Or fastest delivery Friday, February 3. Order within 20 hrs 34 mins

Select delivery location

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Jenson Books Inc

Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the Author

Kurt Vonnegut

Hocus Pocus Mass Market Paperback – November 1, 1991

by Kurt Vonnegut (Author)

587 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$5.99

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$38.29

$34.40

$3.56

Paperback

"Please retry"

$14.59

$9.95

$2.22

Mass Market Paperback

"Please retry"

$8.99

$1.00

Audio CD, Audiobook, CD, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$15.40

$9.64

$9.77

Enhance your purchase

From the New York Times bestselling author of Slaughterhouse-Five comes an irresistible novel that combines “clever wit with keen social observation...[and] re-establishes Mr. Vonnegut’s place as the Mark Twain of our times” (Atlanta Journal & Constitution).

Here is the adventure of Eugene Debs Hartke. He’s a Vietnam veteran, a jazz pianist, a college professor, and a prognosticator of the apocalypse (and other things Earth-shattering). But that’s neither here nor there. Because at Tarkington College—where he teaches—the excrement is about to hit the air-conditioning. And it’s all Eugene’s fault.

Print length

336 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Berkley
Publication date

November 1, 1991
Dimensions

4.14 x 0.86 x 6.7 inches
ISBN-10

0425130215
ISBN-13

978-0425130216
See all details

Frequently bought together

+
+

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Some of these items ship sooner than the others.

Show details Hide details

Choose items to buy together.

by Kurt Vonnegut Mass Market Paperback
$8.99
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
by Kurt Vonnegut Paperback
$12.99
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Get it as soon as Friday, Feb 3
by Kurt Vonnegut Paperback
$16.99
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Get it as soon as Friday, Feb 3

Kurt Vonnegut
580
Paperback
115 offers from $0.99
Kurt Vonnegut
1,550
Paperback
105 offers from $3.00
Kurt Vonnegut
520
Paperback
80 offers from $4.84
Kurt Vonnegut
921
Paperback
87 offers from $1.21
Kurt Vonnegut
783
Paperback
81 offers from $2.92
Kurt Vonnegut
3,291
Paperback
150 offers from $2.44

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While awaiting trial for an initially unspecified crime, Vietnam vet and college professor Eugene Debs Hartke realizes that he has killed exactly as many people as he has had sex with, a coincidence that causes him to doubt his atheism. According to PW , "The cumulative power of the novel is considerable, revealing Vonnegut at his fanciful and playful best."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Praise for Hocus Pocus

“Hocus Pocus is the most topical, realistic Vonnegut novel to date...he is a satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion.”—Jay McInerney, The New York Times

“Vonnegut's best novel in years—funny and prophetic, yes, and fabulous too, as cunning as Aesop and as gloomy as Grimm...He's up to something special in Hocus Pocus.”—The Nation

“A king-sized relief valve of comedy. Every bit as humorous as Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions or any of Vonnegut's other comic masterpieces...Vonnegut evokes the cynical chortle, the knowing grin, the inner laughter that soothes our troubled reflections...He's mad as hell and laughing all the way to the apocalypse.”—Playboy

“His voice is one of the most original in popular American fiction...sharp-toothed satire...truly hilarious...Hocus Pocus is ample proof that his literary prestidigitation can still amuse and delight.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Irresistible...Hocus Pocus is vintage Vonnegut, witty, startling, satiric...off-the-wall brilliance. Vonnegut is a true original. Hocus Pocus is not only poignant and provocative, it is outrageous and very funny indeed. If Luck and Time are the two prime movers of the Universe, we are lucky in our time to have a Kurt Vonnegut to prod us, scold us, astonish us, unnerve us, entertain us and make us laugh.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Berkley (November 1, 1991)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0425130215
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0425130216
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.14 x 0.86 x 6.7 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,006,886 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,502 in Fiction Satire
- #23,950 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #47,126 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
587 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Kurt Vonnegut

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Kurt Vonnegut was a writer, lecturer and painter. He was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During WWII, as a prisoner of war in Germany, he witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired Slaughterhouse Five. First published in 1950, he went on to write fourteen novels, four plays, and three short story collections, in addition to countless works of short fiction and nonfiction. He died in 2007.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

587 global ratings

5 star		64%
4 star		20%
3 star		10%
2 star		3%
1 star		3%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all customer images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

MA

Boots

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 8, 2022

Verified Purchase

House sucked and was lame at the beginning but started make sense later and was goood

He was a real loser!!

Helpful

J. Blake

WHILE THERE IS A SOUL IN PRISON, I AM NOT FREE!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 27, 2016

Verified Purchase

Vonnegut resembles Picasso; outrage goaded both to produce their most noteworthy work. Since Dresden was Vonnegut’s Guernica, his more recent novels often are compared to Slaughterhouse Five. Hocus Pocus measures up nicely. Because Vonnegut continues to protest human mistreatment of one another, this 1991 effort deserves our attention. Vonnegut is a storyteller rather than an essayist, however. This novel entertains and satisfies; many readers will choose to linger in Scipio, New York before moving on to something completely different.

Many of us who left our home towns decades ago in search of gentler climates and enhanced employment possibilities still view central New York State’s hills, valleys and lakes with considerable affection. Those readers from Scipio will recognize that Vonnegut’s portrayals of the town and particularly the Attica Prison riot are poetic rather than factual.

Nowadays this novel is amazing reading in the USA when countless corporations are maneuvering to avoid employing the country’s men and women; when the top 2% of the citizenry controls an obscene portion of the nation’s wealth; when a great many residents view immigrants as threats to the nation’s wellbeing rather than enriching enhancements of its society; when police are slow to behave as though Black lives matter; when the 2016 presidential primaries and elections bugger belief! Like Vonnegut, Eugene Debs Hartke views such developments as products of hocus pocus by the world’s self-absorbed, all-to-powerful elite.

Hartke is an outsider with social skills. Fresh out of West Point, he inspired military conscripts to rain fire upon Vietnamese villages. Repentant in subsequent decades, he moved on to teach affluent college undergraduate dyslexics; with the same skill and caring he taught hard-core prison inmates in later years. He remembers all sexual partners fondly, over eighty women! His unwillingness to toddy to those in power, however, limits what he can accomplish. He soldiers on alone accomplishing as much as possible in a tragically imperfect world.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Ariel Dowling

My First Vonnegut

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 3, 2015

Verified Purchase

Well I did it, I read my first Vonnegut!

If you enjoy cynicism and satire, then this is the book for you. The over arching themes in this book are dedicated to sociopolitical topics with the biggest focus on war, specifically the Vietnam war. Our main character is a decorated Vietnam vet who finds himself teaching rich learning-disabled students and nursing his mentally unstable wife and mother-in-law. The antics that ensue are pretty unbelievable but are told with enough actual facts that it is almost believable.

There are quite a following of die-hard Vonnegut fans so I know I'm not doing this review justice. One reviewer called the book choppy due to its paragraphs told almost on separate occasions with at least an inch of space between each paragraph. I personally enjoyed this, it made me feel like I was getting through the reading faster ... which could have just been an illusion of course. I would suggest that it is written this way to show how the events of history and one man's life, including the lives of the people he has come across, are indeed connected, but not in a linear fashion. Vonnegut wrote the book like life, it's a bit choppy.

As I was reading it did remind me of Catch-22, but that must be the satire and major war theme that they have in common. One thing that I did observe upon recollection is that there is no resolve and as a reader I do like resolve, but I appreciate the author's style due to the context. There are plenty of fun parts at the beginning but as the story goes, the fun parts kind of dissolve. I think this is on purpose though, it connected with the message that Vonnegut was telling. The message about Vietnam vets, corporate America being owned by other countries instead of America, and the appalling state of affairs in our penitentiaries.

But I could be wrong. I didn't give this one a lot of stars which is unlike me because I love rating things high, but I don't think I was in the right mood for this one. I look forward to reading more of his work though. It kept me captivated, I wanted to know how it ended which says a lot about a book I think.

7 people found this helpful

Helpful

Anthoney Baker

One of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut novels!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 6, 2019

Verified Purchase

I came upon Kurt Vonnegut is the most unusual way, I found Hocus Pocus in a box left in the attic from the previous tenant of a lake house in Lincoln City, Oregon. Now, being a kid from the 1980's when I saw "Hocus Pocus" I thought of the Disney Movie, in fact I thought this book might be novel version of the film, well, it's not, and reading it changed my life. After I read Hocus Pocus I collected every Kurt Vonnegut book I could lay my hands on, Cat's Cradle, Player Piano, Breakfast of Champions, Mother Night, and of course, Slaughterhouse Five. I have read them all and Kurt Vonnegut is my absolute favorite author. Nobody would recommend Hocus Pocus as the introduction to Kurt Vonnegut, as this book is laiden with insider jokes about some of his other works, but I am glad that I came into the fold the way I did. Do yourself a favor and read Hocus Pocus, and when you are finished with it, leave it in an attic for some future reader to stumble upon it in the most beautiful and natural way.

17 people found this helpful

Helpful

Kindle Customer

Biting satire from 1990 seems relevant today

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 22, 2019

Verified Purchase

I started reading without knowing the publication date. After finishing I looked up the book's Wikipedia page and was surprised because much of the satire seemed very topical even today, such as the discussion on race and the prison system. The prose is typical Vonnegut: the first person narrative meanders, leaps back and forth in time, goes off on tangents, and points out funny connections. I would assume this kind of storytelling would be perfect for an audiobook but there isn't one on audible.

But why does the narrator think the Earth is due for an ice age? Surely global warming was a huge concern even at the time of writing.

I used to read Vonnegut as a teen: Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse Five, Slapstick etc. (all in translation, naturally). Haven't read the later ones, which is probably a mistake.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

M Keeble

An entertaining and interesting read.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 26, 2018

Verified Purchase

I try to be a "glass half full" person most of the time. However I have to say that I rather enjoyed the bleak humour in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Hocus Pocus(it has nothing to do with magic). These are some of my favourite lines:

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe.

I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.

He predicted that human slavery would come back, that it had in fact never gone away.

Being an American means never having to say you're sorry.

We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.

I now stand by that statement 100%. All nations bigger than Denmark are crocks of doo-doo.

To me, wanting every habitable planet to be inhabited is like wanting everybody to have athlete's foot.

Usually when people talk about trickle down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because there are two things people at the top can't stand, they have to be leakage and overflow.

Despite our enormous brains and jam packed libraries, we germ hotels cannot expect to understand everything.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

Beer of course is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

"At least we still have freedom of speech," I said.
And she said, " That isn't something somebody else gives you. That's something you give yourself."

We could have saved the planet, but we were too doggone cheap. Only he didn't say "doggone".

5 people found this helpful

Yeoman

Fear and Loathing in the Penal Business

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 4, 2020

Verified Purchase

Well, that rarest of things. A nearly boring, straightforward KV novel.

Told in an almost linear fashion this is the tale of Eugene Debs Hartke; soldier-killer, teacher, prison tutor and sometime lothario. His story of accident, jailbreak and mayhem on the campus is pretty much as indicated in the blurb on the back which seldom is the case for Vonnegut when published in Vintage Classics.

The political comment in this one is biting as ever and focused on racism, prison reform and segregation, paid for education and the takeover of American assets, through economic stealth, by Japan - remember this was written in 1990; read now as China.

Witty but written with the rather annoying conceit that Hartke has scribbled this all down on random scraps of paper. The last, and for me least successful, KV novel. Still, it is all Kurt.

Cough, cough and a special (;) for Mr V.

2 people found this helpful

V. G. Harwood

7 people found this helpful

Vicuña

Is there hope for mankind?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 18, 2014

Verified Purchase

Vonnegut's style is unconventional and idiosyncratic. He defies convention and in this tale, the story is fragmented both literally and figuratively by the 'fact' that it's captured on scraps of paper which vary in size.

As in other works, he's dark, filled with pessimism and hints of anarchy. Is it even possible to summarize or fully interperet a non linear story which considers post Vietnam Imperialism, racism, drugs, globalisation and a raft of other themes?

It's some ( many!) years since I went through a Vonnegut phase which included Cats's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five. I wasn't sure whether I'd find his style and content dated, irrelevant and contrived. Verdict; yes, he's probably an acquired taste. But there's a great deal of humour hidden within the apparent hopelessness which faces mankind. It's still works as satire. And the underlying message remains relevant; never trust a politician or TV... Hocus PocusI

One person found this helpful

Felix the cat

Just brilliant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 30, 2021

Verified Purchase

Well, what was that all about? How black is his humour? How dismissive is he of the human race. Kurt Vonnegut once again shows he is the master of bathos

One person found this helpful

See all reviews

Follow the Author