A “pale boy with unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs” plunges into a frozen lake. One mother decides to call Child Welfare on another. A veteran returns from abroad to find his home turned into another kind of unfriendly country. But the new collection is otherwise tellingly earthbound. It’s as sinister and strange as anything Saunders has ever done. He’s still there, sort of-at the heart of Tenth of December is an astonishing story, “Escape from Spiderhead,” about a prison colony of murderers who become lab rats, victims of a disinterested evil far worse than their own. likes me because after she taught me a few obscure 1800s ballads and I parlayed them into Individual Achievement Awards, I bought her a Rubik’s Cube,” he wrote in “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.” Even as recently as 2006’s In Persuasion Nation Saunders was still off freewheeling in space, thinking up heartrending vignettes about latex baby masks that speak for the children suffocating underneath them, gulags of product-testing teenagers, genocide-themed reality-television shows. His sentences described off-kilter worlds we could admire but never hope to fully live in: “The Mrs. His early writing was pleasingly alien but didn’t always connect. He was a maximalist-Barry Hannah raised on Saturday-morning cartoons and optimism instead of alcohol and anger. For a while, SaundersLand was its own distant planet. It’s almost hard to fathom how a writer this good could get better. In earlier collections like CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) and Pastoralia (2000), Saunders indulged a fascination with melancholy ghosts, death-filled theme parks, and near-future dystopias governed by commandment-slogans like Robust Economy, Super Moral Climate! These settings were crutches, if delightfully novel ones-“a mechanical way to force me into those weird situations where some voice has to come,” as Saunders once put it.īut you could know all this and still know almost nothing about Tenth of December, Saunders’s new story collection. By now, we know the George Saunders tool kit: his favored verbs, such as to “wonk.” His stylistic tics, such as “such as.” The arbitrarily capitalized phrases, copyrighted and trademarked: I CAN SPEAK! TM And we know the concerns those nouns and verbs betray: the encroachment of advertising into our emotional lives the juxtaposition of the casual and the colloquial with the profound the enthusiasm and earnest sincerity with which we lie to ourselves and others.

Tenth of december stories