Awards
A New York Times Notable Book of 2000.
One of Entertainment Weekly's Ten Best Fiction Books of 2000.
From Powells.com
In an era that boasts Jerry Springer, Tammy Faye Baker, and "Survivor
Africa," it's difficult to make it as a satirist. Any effort to exaggerate
the world's ridiculous contractions the satirist's stock in trade
falls flat. Reality has already become a surreal parody of itself. So, an author
who can inflate what is already extreme, without resorting to gimmicks or sounding
forced, has really achieved something. George
Saunders does just this by relating his weird stories about bizarre theme
parks, computer-generated game shows, and self-help gurus in a voice as bland
as Donald Rumsfeld's. Yet underneath their deadpan veneer, these stories are biting,
dark, and very, very funny, a pleasantly postmodern answer to Kurt Vonnegut. Saunders's
achievements have not gone unnoticed. Civil
War Land in Bad Decline, his first book, was a New York Times Notable Book
and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. Saunders has further received three
National Magazine Awards and three O. Henry Awards, including one for the brilliant
title story of Pastoralia. The New Yorker also named Saunders one
of the country's Twenty Best Writers Under Forty. C. P. Farley, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
In the old days, when heads were constantly poking in, we liked what we did. Really hammed it up. Had little grunting fights....Sometimes we'd go down to Russian Peasant Farm for a barbecue, I remember there was Murray and Leon, Leon was dating Eileen, Eileen was the one with all the cats, but now, with the big decline in heads poking in, the Russian Peasants are all elsewhere, some to Administration but most not, Eileen's cats have gone wild, and honest to God sometimes I worry I'll go to the Big Slot and find it goatless.
If Americans in the future were to try to send us a message about where our culture is heading, they might simply point to the fiction of George Saunders. Living in a world that's both indelibly original and hauntingly familiar, the characters in these stories bring to life our most absurd tendencies, and allow us to see ourselves in a shocking, uproariously funny new light.
Here you find people who live and work in a simulated, theme-park cave and communicate with their loved ones via fax machine. You encounter a family happily gathered around their favorite form of entertainment, a computer-generated TV show called The Worst That Could Happen. And you hear an upbeat self-help guru sermonize about how figuring out who's been "crapping in your oatmeal" will help raise your self-esteem. With an uncanny sense of how our culture reflects our character, Saunders mixes a deadpan naturalism with a wicked sense of humor to reveal a picture of contemporary America that's both feverishly strange and, through his characters' perseverance, oddly hopeful.
Named by The New Yorker one of the Twenty Best American Writers Under Forty, George Saunders has been recognized as a visionary storyteller with a hypnotic style. Critics have placed him in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, and Thomas Pynchon — "a savage satirist with a sentimental streak," said The New York Times. These stories bring greater wisdom and maturity to the worldview he established with his first collection, and leave little doubt that he has found a place in modern fiction all his own.
Review
"An astoundingly tuned voice — graceful, dark, authentic, and funny — telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times." Thomas Pynchon
Review
"Intoxicating." Time Out
Review
"Exuberantly weird...brutally funny." The New York Times
Review
"Compulsively swallowed, sweetly addictive." San Francisco Bay Guardian
Review
"Demands to be reread immediately." The Wall Street Journal
Review
"Hilarious and heartrending." The Village Voice
Review
"Breathtaking, brutally hilarious satire, a savage skewering not only of the American workplace, but of the American character itself....Pastoralia is a masterpiece of unsettling comedy." San Diego Union Tribune
Review
"Screamingly funny." Time
Review
"Saunders is a provocateur, a moralist, a zealot, a lefty, and a funny, funny writer, and the stories in Pastoralia delight. We're very lucky to have them." Esquire
Review
"Artful and sophisticated...truly unusual. Imagine Lewis's Babbitt thrown into the back seat of a car going cross-country, driven by R. Crumb, Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, Harvey Pekar, or Spike Jonze. That'd be a story Saunders could tell." The New York Times
Review
"The short-story collection of the year....Pastoralia does everything a gathering of tales is supposed to do: It touches the reader but also provokes reflection, mirth, and pain." Kansas City Star
Review
"Dazzling....Saunders's misfits confront their degradations with heroic optimism; rarely have the comic nuances of suffering been tracked with such precision. These stories, injected with Saunders's highly original blend of irony and tenderness, ride you down spirals of the absurd and fling you back to your own life, startled." Men's Journal
Review
"A master of distilling the disorders of our time into fiction." Salon
Review
"Fiercely funny...[Saunders is] a master of the self-flagellating interior monologue." The Boston Globe
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"Being inside the teeming heads of these folks is amusing and enlightening. So accurately are [his characters] rendered, in all their flawed glory, that they appear not only perfectly human but familiar." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Mr. Saunders' satiric vision of America is dark and demented: it is also ferocious and very funny." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
"Riveting." U.S. News and World Report
About the Author
George Saunders is the author of the story collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award, and of The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, a New York Times bestseller. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.