The world is not what it used to be. Gravity is heavy one day and light the next, the Chinese have miniaturized themselves, the United States is no longer a nation, and Dr. Wilbur "Daffodil-11" Swain (the last American president, and currently the king of what's left of Manhattan) is a hundred years old and writing his memoirs. Kurt Vonnegut introduces us to Wilbur and his twin sister Eliza—strange children who together formed a single super-intelligent mind—and explores his own particular slapstick experience of living in the world in this 1976 absurdist novel.