This is a critical companion to Vonnegut's early novels. ""Understanding Kurt Vonnegut"" is a critical analysis of Vonnegut's fiction as a point of entrance for students and general readers alike. In close readings of Vonnegut's novels, William Rodney Allen examines the distinctive stylistic, thematic, and formally innovative elements that earned Vonnegut (1922-2007) a mass following, especially among young readers, as well as critical respect among scholars.

Joel and Ethan Coen (b. 1954, 1957) started their careers in obscurity on a shoestring budget cajoled from family and friends in Minneapolis. Working entirely outside the studio system, the Coen brothers scored an unlikely first success in 1984 with their postmodern noir film "Blood Simple." Two decades and nearly a dozen movies later, the Coens are now among the best-known writer/directors in Hollywood, turning out major studio releases featuring such stars as George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Tom Hanks.

The Coens' films all share a distinctive, quirky ambience that critics have come to identify as "that Coen brothers feeling." Tricky moving camera work, frequent use of the voiceover, homages to directors and cinematic genres, a fascination with unexpected and off-kilter violence, and omnipresent black humor are all defining elements of the Coens' cinematic world.

From such highly stylized movies as "Barton Fink" and "The Man Who Wasn't There" to more mainstream but dark comedies such as "Raising Arizona," "Intolerable Cruelty," and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," the Coens are equally at home with existential despair and comic exuberance and are known for scripts packed with an obvious love for language. This collection of their most important interviews spans twenty years and is the most comprehensive published on the brothers.

William Rodney Allen teaches at Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts. He is the author of "Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer" and the editor of "Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut," both published by University Press of Mississippi.

This valuable and informative book is a study of Percy's five novels in the context of his southern and American literary sources and his tragic personal history. Though Percy has emphasized mainly his European existential influences, his highly allusive novels echo his tragic early years in the South, as well as his ambivalent relationship with his adoptive father William Alexander Percy and his awareness of such writers as Twain, Hemingway, and Warren.

This perceptive study examines Percy's novels in the light of psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and literary analysis. The author finds that Percy's fiction has been shaped as much by what Percy rejected as by what he embraced.

This book is "admirable first of all for its good taste. It respects Walker Percy's privacy. . . . It offers fair readings, generous readings, and ultimately new and rewarding readings." --Lewis Lawson

Kurt Vonnegut says: "I've worked with enough students to know what beginning writers are like, and if they will just talk to me for twenty minutes I can help them so much, because there are such simple things to know. Make a character want something-that's how you begin." William Rodney Allen teaches English at the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts. He is the author of "Walker Percy: The Southern Wayfarer."