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
"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
"In his new collection, Saunders's tales cover larger, more exciting territory, with an abundance of ideas, meanings and psychological nuance. Saunders can be brutally funny, and the better his stories are, the more melancholic, somber and subtle they are, too." Lynne Tillman, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Saunders's extraordinary talent is in top form in his second collection...in which his vision of a hellishly (and hopefully) exaggerated dystopia of late capitalist America is warmed and impassioned by his regular, irregular, and flat-out wacky characters. Merging the spirit of James Thurber with the world of The Simpsons, Saunders's five stories and title novella feature protagonists who are losers yet also innocent dreamers....The tales pit bleak existences with details so contemporary they're futuristic....Saunders, with a voice unlike any other writer's, makes these losers funny, plausible and absolutely winning." Publishers Weekly
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
"Mr. Saunders' satiric vision of America is dark and demented: it is also ferocious and very funny." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
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
"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
About the Author
George Saunders is the author of the short story collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award and a New York Times Notable Book for that year. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.
Table of Contents
Pastoralia -- Winky -- Sea oak -- The end of FIRPO in the world -- The barber's unhappiness -- The falls.