"Davis's book is an engaging examination of the issue at the heart of all Vonnegut's fiction--Vonnegut's humanism. With acumen and grace, Davis exposes Vonnegut's ongoing relevance to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and illustrates how Vonnegut manages to retain his status as one of the most important figureheads in postmodern literature while remaining socially conscious and humane.

Todd F. Davis is Associate Professor of English at Penn State at Altoona. He is coauthor (with Kenneth Womack) of Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory and coeditor (with Womack) of Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four (also published by SUNY Press), Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory, and The Critical Response to John Irving. He is also the author of a book of poetry, Ripe.