Where to Start with George Saunders
George Saunders writes about people trapped in systems that are designed to make them less human, and about the stubborn, often ridiculous ways they try to remain decent anyway. His fiction takes place in worlds that are just barely exaggerated versions of our own: corporate dystopias, pharmaceutical experiments, theme parks built on human suffering. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a Booker Prize winner for Lincoln in the Bardo, and widely regarded as one of the most important short story writers alive. His influence on contemporary American fiction is enormous, and his voice, compassionate, satirical, formally inventive, is unmistakable.
Start here
Tenth of December
George Saunders · 272 pages · 2013 · Moderate
Themes: empathy, class, corporate life, mortality, human connection
Ten stories set in worlds that are uncomfortably close to our own. A boy lost in fantasy stumbles across a man walking into the woods to end his life. A woman takes a drug that fills her with unconditional love for everything. An employee at a corporate theme park sacrifices his dignity in increments so small he barely notices. Tenth of December is the collection that made George Saunders a household name, a National Book Award finalist and the winner of the inaugural Folio Prize.
Why Start Here
This is Saunders at the peak of his powers, and it gives you everything his fiction does best in one volume. The satire is sharp but never cruel. The invented worlds, corporate testing facilities, pharmaceutical nightmares, amusement parks that monetize human despair, feel like our world pushed forward by about fifteen minutes. And beneath the formal brilliance and the dark humor, there is a deep, unironic tenderness for people who are doing their best in systems that were never designed to help them.
The title story, about a terminally ill man and a lonely boy whose paths cross on a frozen lake, is one of the great American short stories of the twenty-first century. It earns its emotion honestly, without sentimentality, through the sheer precision of its observation.
What to Expect
Ten stories that range from very short to novella length. The prose is distinctive: compressed, voice-driven, often narrated in a kind of corporate-speak that becomes both funny and heartbreaking. Several stories use speculative or slightly futuristic settings. The tone moves between satire and genuine sorrow, sometimes within a single paragraph.