George
Saunders is the author of the story collections Pastoralia
and CivilWarLand
in Bad Decline, both of which were New York Times Notable
Books, and a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers
of Frip, a New York Times Bestseller. He teaches at
Syracuse University.
Visit
the official George Saunders website at GeorgeSaundersLand.com.
PRAISE
FOR GEORGE SAUNDERS
CivilWarLand
in Bad Decline
“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
“Like the illegitimate offspring of Nathanael West and Kurt
Vonnegut…Mr. Saunders’s satiric vision of America is dark
and demented; it is also ferocious and very funny.”
–Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Ingenious…full of savage humor and originality [and]
scorching brilliance…the author creates a nightmarish post-apocalyptic
world that might have been envisioned by Walt Disney on acid.”
–The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Scary, hilarious, and unforgettable…George Saunders is
a writer of arresting brilliance and originality.”
–Tobias Wolff
“A demonstrably cool satirist and a wicked stylist.”
–Jay McInerney, The New York Times Book Review
“The book is a rare event: a brilliant new satirist bursting
out of the gate in full stride, wildly funny, pure, generous—all
that a great humorist should be.”
–Garrison Keillor
“An original, darkly funny voice.”
–The Atlanta Constitution
“Wickedly funny.”
–The Miami Herald
Pastoralia
One of Entertainment Weekly’s Ten Best Fiction Books
of 2000
“Wickedly entertaining…Pastoralia is a Dilbert cartoon
inked by Samuel Beckett.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Demands to be reread immediately.”
–The Wall Street Journal
“Artful and sophisticated…truly unusual. Imagine Lewis’s
Babbitt thrown into the backseat 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
“Screamingly funny.”
–Time
“The bold successor to Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut.”
–Nylon
“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
“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.”
–The San Diego Union-Tribune
“Intoxicating.”
–TimeOut New York
“Saunders’s prose is like a drug candy, compulsively swallowed,
sweetly addictive... anarchic and startling.”
— San Francisco Bay Guardian
“Savage, soulful satires…[Saunders is] a master of distilling
the disorder of our time into fiction.”
–Salon.com
“The short-story collection of the year…Pastoralia does
everything a gathering of tales is supposed to do: It touches the
reader but also provoke reflection, mirth, and pain.”
–Kansas City Star
“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
“Fiercely funny…[Saunders is] a searing satirist with
a peculiar sensibility that allows him to wreak havoc on a cheesy
American landscape that is often uproariously implausible yet sickeningly
familiar…A striking collection.”
–The Boston Globe
“Bizarre and original stories…freakish and lovely. It
[looks] as if Saunders had forged a one-man genre; call it Theme Park
Surrealism.”
–LA Weekly
“Hilarious and heartrending in equal measures…Saunders
is a brilliant distortionist who devises dark, hallucinatory arenas
and sets fierce satires against countercurrents of grotesque sentimentality.”
–The Village Voice
“Riveting.”
–U.S. News & World Report
“Finely tuned, mordantly funny, and original.”
–The Atlantic Monthly
