A critical overview of the work features the writings of Terry Southern, William S. Doxey, Jerome Klinkowitz, Richard Giannone, John L. Simons, James Lundquist, and other scholars.

- After the bomb, Dad came up with ice / Terry Southern
- Vonnegut's Cat's cradle / William S. Doxey
- The private person as public figure / Jerome Klinkowitz
- Cat's cradle / Richard Giannone
- Tangled up in you : a playful reading of Cat's cradle / John L. Simons
- From formula toward experiment : Cat's cradle and God bless you, Mr. Rosewater / Jerome Klinkowitz
- Playful genesis and dark revelation in Cat's cradle / Leonard Mustazza
- Bokononism as a structure of ironies / Zoltan Ab di-Nagy
- Mother night, Cat's cradle, and The crimes of our time / Jerome Klinkowitz
- Vonnegut's invented religions as sense-making systems / Peter Freese
- Icy solitude : magic and violence in Macondo and San Lorenzo / Wendy B. Faris
- Vonnegut's cosmos / David H. Goldsmith
- Cosmic irony / James Lundquist
- Cat's cradle : Jonah and the whale / Lawrence R. Broer
- Hurting 'til it laughs : the painful-comic science fiction stories of Kurt Vonnegut / Peter J. Reed
- The paradox of "awareness" and language in Vonnegut's fiction / Loree Rackstraw.