Book description
In this, his first collection of essays, Saunders trains his eye on the
real world rather than the fictional and reveals it to be brimming with
wonderful, marvellous strangeness. As he faces a political and cultural
reality saturated with lazy media, false promises and political
doublespeak, Saunders invokes the wisdom of American literary heroes
Twain, Vonnegut and Barthelme and inspires us to re-examine our
assumptions about the world we live in, as we struggle to discover what
is really there. â  Again and again, Saunders demonstrates that
wacky, subversive, formally strange writing is not only contrary to our
nation's capitalist spirit, it's the most natural and effective of
responses to it. He makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We're
lucky to have him' George Saunders is the author of the novella
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil
and three short story collections, In Persuasion Nation, Pastoralia
and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
, as well as the children s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
. His work has received four National Magazine Awards, and has been
selected for the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories
collections. In 1999, Saunders was recognized as one of the 20 best
young American fiction writers by the New Yorker. He teaches in the
creative writing program at Syracuse University.
