Matthew Gannon is a freelance writer whose current work focuses on cultural criticism – particularly political and philosophical analyses of contemporary film, television, literature, and other media. His main interests are in continental philosophy, the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and existentialism. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin Magazine, and Salon. His essays for The Vonnegut Review take particular notice of Vonnegut's inquiry into time and time travel, bureaucracy, media, and the relationship between humanity and technology. Above all he seeks to elucidate what Vonnegut understands as human in a deeply dehumanizing political and technological era and the solutions Vonnegut devises to conserve, esteem, and, ultimately, liberate humanity from its existential, social, and political oppressions.
This summer, Matt will be reviewing Player Piano; Mother Night; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine; Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday; Jailbird; Galapagos; and Hocus Pocus.
Like Winston Niles Rumfoord from The Sirens of Titan, Matt is from Rhode Island, U.S.A., Earth, Solar System, Milky Way. You can follow him on Twitter, Tumblr, and his personal website, The Angelus Novus Blog.
Wilson Taylor is a writer and teacher living in the American South. Wilson is inspired by German and French theorists and enamored with Shakespeare. His work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin Magazine, and Salon. His main areas of inquiry for The Vonnegut Review are Vonnegut's literary technique and conceptions of the human, with an emphasis on how Vonnegut's idiomatic and idiosyncratic use of language subversively imagines and re-imagines human existence and experience, and on his existential sympathy in light of the absurd.
Read his opening essay, "Irony and Authenticity in the American Imagination."
This summer, Wilson will be reviewing The Sirens of Titan; Cat's Cradle; Slaughterhouse-Five; Slapstick; Deadeye Dick; Bluebeard; and Timequake.
