Have you ever heard a politically incorrect joke and laughed, and then felt guilty, but then laughed again?Have you ever driven by a car wreck and slowed down to see the emergency response vehicles, and the vehicle made to look like a damaged accordion?Have you ever watched a reality TV show and saw folks fighting each other and tearing clothes and being separated by bouncers and realized you were hypnotized by the gross lowest common denominator humanity?Have you read Civilwarland in Bad Declin...

Using lavish grotesque and generously mocking political correctness and hypocrisy George Saunders thrashes everyday life to pitiful trash, reducing the States to the ridiculous dystopia of dark ages.That night I sleep a troubled sleep beside a fetid stream. I dream of Limbo, a tiny room full of dull people eternally discussing their dental work while sipping lukewarm tea. I wake at first light and hike through miles of failing forest and around noon arrive in a village of paranoiacs standing wit...

I already knew & liked the title track so I skipped to the big novella "Bounty" and thought hello hello this is like a Motown follow-up where say "Reach Out I’ll be There" was followed up by "Standing in the Shadows of Love" which is like the same song tweaked a bit (but still great) or "I Can’t Help Myself" followed up by "It’s the Same Old Song" which really is, how daringly blatant they were. I thought this was a short story collection but it’s more like a rock opera, where the stories inhabi...

Whacky reportage on squalid desperation. Some impressive literary gymnastics and unpredictable outcomes make this a lot of fun. This juxtaposed with the fact that everyone is actually having a horrible time gives it that strange sense of pathos via entertainment, or as often the more classic serving of entertainment at the expense of the downtrodden, non-gratuitous of course. Perhaps somewhat akin to a Vonnegut novel in short form

Poor George Saunders must have had a real real bad theme park experience in his youth. This collection of stories makes the dystopia of Zombieland seem sedate. I love Saunders' take on American consumption and the way he is able to shove values and virtues of 20th century America into a funky future that makes all our virtues absurd and makes this anti-utopia seem closer than you might have previously imagined.

So this is where it all began for George Saunders. In the wonderful preface (which can be read in full here), he reveals that he wrote these stories over the course of seven years while working a monotonous office job. Once he had compiled the tedious technical reports at his desk, he spent every spare minute working on this collection, hiding it from his boss. (Sidenote: This sounds very familiar to me. I work in a similarly unstimulating role and tend to spend much of it daydreaming about book...

Reading parts of this in the morning put me in a bad mood for the whole fucking day.

Set in a near-future America which appears to have become one big dilapidated theme park, the bizarre stories (and novella) of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline are by turns funny, disturbing and moving. Saunders' characters are invariably weird, eccentric, even occasionally horrifying, yet they end up feeling more human than the majority of fictional characters. It's also satisfying to find I can now detect Saunders' influence in the work of so many other writers I admire - to name a few: Lindsay Hun...

A tough book to rate. More like 3.5.Blown away by Saunders's most recent book of stories, Tenth Of December, I was curious about his debut book of stories and a novella, published in 1996. There are similar themes: dystopias, social injustice, exploitation. And that unique narrative voice – satiric, colloquial, with a finely tuned ear to the banal cadences of the tech world and corporate-speak – is certainly there.But perhaps because I liked the later book so much, these feel embryonic, brimming...

A collection of short stories and one novella, this was Saunders’ debut and I have decidedly mixed feelings about it. It has glowing reviews and the cover blurbs all proclaim that George Saunders is a brilliant satirist and this book marks “the debut of an exciting new voice in fiction” (I really need to start ignoring cover blurbs when making book-buying decisions). Comparisons are made to Kurt Vonnegut and Nathaniel West throughout the review excerpts, but I really didn’t feel the book lived u...

Science fiction does not normally tickle my fancy, but this time is relevant as just a few decades into the American future and I enjoyed the humorously dark short stories of theme parks and working-class pathos, but I truly loved the novella: My experience with short stories capped with a novella is a good one, where this first time author (in 1996) seems to be warming up and readying for a novel. The novella "Bounty" is my favorite, a kind of Pilgrim's Progress where the mutated minority (the

‘What a degraded cosmos.’We live in a world where cruelty towards others is becoming more and more accepted – how easy we rationalize our self-righteous anger against someone who cut us off, brought us an undercooked meal, said something stupid, etc., and even seen as funny. Saunders, like the ghost of Christmas future, would like to show us where that is leading us. Civilwarland In Bad Decline, his first collection of stories, paints a grim portrait of a near-future filled with everything from

Man, this little guy...I can't fault it a single sentence. Every story in this tiny collection made me want to high-five the author with one hand and cradle my hanging head in the other. Maybe I was a bit hard on his later Pastoralia because I needed to warm up to Saunders, maybe my head was just in the right space this time around, or perhaps this really is the superior group of stories. Whatever magical trippydippy cosmos aligning parade of "f*ck yeah" was going on, I dug the expletive deleted...

Welcome to the OccupationThe whole way through George Saunders' first collection of short stories, there are suggestions that the world is not as it should be.Imagine a world like this, totally unlike our own:The characters and narrators are (or are surrounded by) kooks and wackos. People have names like Shirleen and Melvin. Where there were once cornfields and flood plains, there are now parking stations and theme parks. Gangs invade civil war re-enactments. All dreams are defiled. All entertai...

Me at 18: I read Vonnegut; I read Tom Robbins; I read Mark Leyner; I read Douglas Adams. I had just left the nest in a small Oklahoma town. I knew hardship. I knew the void of culture that threatens to suck you in like a black hole. I knew the vapid anguish that takes center stage in Saunders' stories. Humor was therapy then, the absurd a close friend. We scoffed at the religious majority and their follies, poked fun at the consumerist drone of daily existence. Then came anger and resentment. Bu...

The past couple of months, two activities have dominated my leisure time: reading and watching NBA hoops. After reading CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, I was reminded of a hoops argument that I think should carry over to modern literature as well. The argument has to deal with the unceasing quest for the so-called next Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan was the transcendent athlete, if not public figure, of my childhood. There are a generation of kids who still drink Gatorade, buy Nikes, and wear Hanes...

"I can hide my Flaw by always wearing shoes?" I say feebly."Pshaw," she says. "It's these people's business to know a Flawed. They can smell a Flawed coming. They eat Flaweds for breakfast.""She's my sister," I say. "I have to go.""Then get out of my sight," she says in a trembling voice. "I consider you a suicide. Goodbye, dear dead boy. Our Lord has reserved a special place in Limbo for those who put an end to themselves.""I'll be okay," I say."No," she says firmly. "You won't." CivilWarLand i...

Video-review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aiH7...Featured in my Top 5 George Saunders Books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bc7g...George Saunders' debut collection goes a bit over the top with its emotional charge at times, but remains an immensely rewarding, if upsetting, experience. Its stories are balanced and rewarding (although kinda same-y occasionally), the Bounty novella is less elegant but quite unforgettable, and overall he can do things in the span of a page that will make you...

George Saunders is one of those wonderful discoveries I had last year. His Folio Prize winning Tenth of December blew me away and I knew I had to read more, if not all, of his works. I wanted to go down the line of his fiction books, with Civilwarland in Bad Decline being the earliest, published 17 years earlier than Tenth of December. The short stories from the former may not be as polished and potent as those of the later, but it still has everything I loved about Saunders' writing. It is ungu...

This is a hard one to rate. I found three of the stories--"CivilWarLand in Bad Decline," "Isabelle," and "The 400-Pound CEO"--absolutely revelatory: trust me, you have never read anything like these stories before. At the risk of adjective overload, they are clever, unsettling, unexpected, and deeply moving--easily five star material. They are dark and apocalyptic but hysterical and heartwarming: the world's gone terribly, terribly wrong, but the narrators are sympathetic, likable guys with fami...