Vonnegut

“I was nervous, and my editor wasn’t sure, either,” says Brown, who cites Kurt Vonnegut as a literary influence.

He left the war with lasting physical and emotional scars and, like such fellow veterans as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, with a will to find words for what had happened.

The city is home to the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, whose namesake author was a close friend of Wakefield’s.

While it’s far from unique — everyone from Miguel Cervantes to James Joyce to Jorge Luis Borges to Kurt Vonnegut have played with metafiction — that doesn’t negate its potential.

The books challenged in Escambia County include Toni Morrison’s classic novel “The Bluest Eye” and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” as well Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl.”