Patrick O’Donnell, Eberly Professor of American Literature at West Virginia University, has taught at universities of Arizona, California-Davis, Bordeaux, and Stuttgart and the Karls-Eberhand University of Tubingen. His previous books on modern and contemporary fiction include Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretations in Contemporary American Fiction (Iowa, 1986) and John Hawkes. He is the editor of New Essays on “The Crying of Lot 49” and coeditor of Intertexuality and Contemporary American Fiction and is now working on a book about paranoia and contemporary American fiction.