Understanding Kurt Vonnegut

"Understanding Kurt Vonnegut is a welcome addition to the growing body of critical work on Vonnegut."—Utopian Studies

"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