The Vonnegut Effect

"The Vonnegut Effect—an exciting new study of one of America's most important, innovative, and popular novelists by one of our most important, innovative, and popular literary critics—is an excellent complement to Jerome Klinkowitz's earlier landmark works. Klinkowitz illustrates the prescience of Kurt Vonnegut's literary vision by demonstrating how Vonnegut's themes and techniques anticipate sociohistorical trends. Lively, provocative, and compelling, The Vonnegut Effect is as interesting and accessible to general readers as it is indispensable to students and scholars of modern American literature and culture."—Barbara Tepa Lupack, author of Insanity as Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction

"Jerome Klinkowitz masterfully illuminates the intersection of a great artist's life and work and, in doing so, creates an engaging and essential study that belongs on the shelf right next to the volumes by the Grand Old Man himself."—Robert B. Weide, writer and producer of Mother Night and Kurt Vonnegut: American Made

"Throughout his trailblazing work on contemporary American fiction, Jerome Klinkowitz has turned to Kurt Vonnegut repeatedly. This new monograph offers the most comprehensive, literary–historically grounded, and reader–friendly account to date of Vonnegut's fiction, with an eye to its evolving strategies of reader appeal."—Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and author of Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning