Understanding Kurt Vonnegut

William Rodney Allen teaches English at the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts in Natchitoches. His other books include Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer, Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, and The Coen Brothers: Interviews.

As both literary critic and academic. Allen cuts through the clarity and the humor, the deceptively simple and the downright silly, to offer a careful... analysis of Vonnegut the serious artist. - Small Press ""Allen centers on the author's most experimental period, reading Mother Night as a tautly structured and tightly focused narrative confession, Cat's Cradle as an exuberant test of such limits, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater as a significant shift to realism, and Slaughterhouse-Five as a masterful transposition of time and space. Among the later works, Allen prefers Jailbird and Bluebeard for their apt renderings of important cultural, social, and political issues."" - American Literary Scholarship