About This Book
Set in a near-future America crumbled under inequality and willful ignorance, Hocus Pocus is Vonnegut's most sustained social satire. Narrator Eugene Debs Hartke — named after the great socialist labor leader — is a Vietnam veteran turned college professor who ends up imprisoned in the very jail he once helped guard. He writes his memoir on scraps of paper, mirroring a fragmented society. Vonnegut's targets are familiar — militarism, racism, the worship of wealth — but the bitterness runs deeper than in earlier work. The jokes still land, but they leave bruises.
For more of Vonnegut's singular voice, Bagombo Snuff Box collects his early magazine fiction, while Jailbird and Timequake offer different angles on his lifelong preoccupation with American inequality and absurdity.