FEBRUARY 2013 - AudioFile
Saunders’s untrained voice is the perfect conveyance for the earnest vernacular of his offbeat characters—and a convincing case for the argument that an author can be the best interpreter of his own text. In a society where the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity, Saunders’s tales of flat-brained parents and well-meaning neighbors and martinet lab directors are simultaneously terrifying and hilarious. His delivery is deadpan, after a fashion known in times past as frontier humor. Here the amazing feats are ones of outlook and mental construction rather than the muscular exploits of a jumping frog or a steamboat captain. The effect lies in an idiom forever out of sorts with the situation at hand—a subtly nuanced contemporary babble that Saunders captures so well on the page, and even better in this memorable audio production. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Gregory Cowles
In Tenth of December, [Saunders's] fourth and best collection, readers will encounter an abduction, a rape, a chemically induced suicide, the suppressed rage of a milquetoast or two, a veteran's post-traumatic impulse to burn down his mother's house—all of it buffeted by gusts of such merriment and tender regard and daffy good cheer that you realize only in retrospect how dark these morality tales really are…despite the dirty surrealism and cleareyed despair, Tenth of December never succumbs to depression. That's partly because of Saunders's relentless humor…But more substantially it's because of his exhilarating attention to language and his beatific generosity of spirit.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
No one writes more powerfully than George Saunders about the lost, the unlucky, the disenfranchised…If his earlier books reverberated with echoes of Nathanael West and Kurt Vonnegut, Mr. Saunders's latest offering…seems to have more in common with Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. There are still touches of surreal weirdness here…but for the most part the humor is more muted and the stories tend to pivot around loneliness, disappointment, frustration and the difficulty of connecting with other human beings. Although sentiment has always lurked beneath the antic, corrugated surface of Mr. Saunders's work, there is a new sympathy for his characters in these pages, an emphasis on how bad luck, poor judgment, lack of resources and family misfortune can snowball into violence or catastrophe.
The Washington Post - Jeff Turrentine
In one way or another, all the tales in Tenth of December, [Saunders's] amazing new collection of stories, are about the tragedy of separation. What distinguishes it from the three equally fine collections that have preceded it…is the added pinch of semi-sweet salvation, an ingredient most other satirists diligently avoid for fear of ruining their sour-by-design recipes.
Publishers Weekly
The title of Saunders's fourth collection doesn't reference any regularly observed holiday, but for the MacArthur-certified genius's fans, a new collection, his first in six years, is a cause to celebrate. Yet the 10 stories here—six of which ran in the New Yorker—might make readers won over by earlier, irony-laced absurdities like Pastoralia's "Sea Oak" or corporate nightmares like "CommComm" from In Persuasion Nation question whether they know Saunders as well as they think they do. Yes, "Puppy" is about a maniacally upbeat mother on a "Family Mission" to adopt a dog only to discover the dog owner's son chained to a tree in the backyard "via some sort of doohicky." Yes, "Escape from Spiderhead" is about evil experiments to make love and take love away using drugs with names like Darkenfloxx™. But readers expecting zany escapism will be humbled by the pathos on display in stories like "Home," where a soldier returns to his humble origins. "Victory Lap" features a disarming case of child kidnapping, and "The Semplica Girl Diaries" is a heartbreaking chronicle of two months of changeable fortune in the life of a lower-middle-class paterfamilias of modest expectation ("graduate college, win Pam, get job, make babies, forget feeling of special destiny"). Eventually, a suspicion creeps in that, behind Saunders's comic talents, he might be the most compassionate writer working today. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM. (Jan. 8)
From the Publisher
Praise for Tenth of December
“The best book you’ll read this year.”—The New York Times Magazine
“A feat of inventiveness . . . This eclectic collection never ceases to delight with its at times absurd, surreal, and darkly humorous look at very serious subjects. . . . George Saunders makes you feel as though you are reading fiction for the first time.”—Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner
“The best short-story writer in English—not ‘one of,’ not ‘arguably,’ but the Best.”—Mary Karr, Time
“A visceral and moving act of storytelling . . . No one writes more powerfully than George Saunders about the lost, the unlucky, the disenfranchised.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Saunders’s startling, dreamlike stories leave you feeling newly awakened to the world.”—People
“It’s no exaggeration to say that short story master George Saunders helped change the trajectory of American fiction.”—The Wall Street Journal
“An irresistible mix of humor and humanity . . . that will make you beam with unmitigated glee. [Grade:] A”—Entertainment Weekly
“Saunders captures the fragmented rhythms, disjointed sensory input, and wildly absurd realities of the twenty-first century experience like no other writer.”—The Boston Globe
“Tenth of December shows George Saunders at his most subversive, hilarious, and emotionally piercing. Few writers can encompass that range of adjectives, but Saunders is a true original—restlessly inventive, yet deeply humane.”—Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad
“George Saunders is a complete original, unlike anyone else, thank god—and yet still he manages to be the rightful heir to three other complete American originals—Barthelme (the lyricism, the playfulness), Vonnegut (the outrage, the wit, the scope), and Twain (the common sense, the exasperation). There is no author I recommend to people more often—for ten years I’ve urged George Saunders onto everyone and everyone. You want funny? Saunders is your man. You want emotional heft? Saunders again. You want stories that are actually about something—stories that again and again get to the meat of matters of life and death and justice and country? Saunders. There is no one better, no one more essential to our national sense of self and sanity.”—Dave Eggers, author of A Hologram for the King
Praise for George Saunders
“Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny.”—Zadie Smith
“George Saunders makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We’re lucky to have him.”—Jonathan Franzen
“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
“Saunders is a writer of arresting brilliance and originality, with a sure sense of his material and apparently inexhaustible resources of voice. . . . Scary, hilarious, and unforgettable.”—Tobias Wolff
“A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth.”—Joshua Ferris
“Saunders’s satiric vision of America is dark and demented; it’s also ferocious and funny.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“George Saunders is so funny and inventive he makes you love words and so wide-eyed wistful he talks you into loving people.”—Sarah Vowell
GEORGE SAUNDERS WAS NAMED ONE OF THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD BY TIME MAGAZINE
San Francisco Chronicle
It's tough to think of a living short-story writer - or even a dead one - who garners as much peer approval as George Saunders. Alice Munro, maybe, but that's about it. . . . It's Saunders whose name is both whispered in reverent tones and shouted from the rooftops by other authors. His sparkling new story collection Tenth of December demonstrates why. . . . Saunders uses humor to amplify tension rather than avoid it, and the results are superb. Many of the 10 stories are comfortable with making us uncomfortable. They go for the jugular instead of the funny bone, and they're capable of astounding, unnerving and delighting all at once. The prose is so smartly crafted throughout that it makes me want to go back and re-evaluate all of Saunders' previous books. But first I plan to re-reread this new collection one more time.
Boston Globe
George Saunders captures the fragmented rhythms, disjointed sensory input, and wildly absurd realities of the 21st century experience like no other writer.
FEBRUARY 2013 - AudioFile
Saunders’s untrained voice is the perfect conveyance for the earnest vernacular of his offbeat characters—and a convincing case for the argument that an author can be the best interpreter of his own text. In a society where the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity, Saunders’s tales of flat-brained parents and well-meaning neighbors and martinet lab directors are simultaneously terrifying and hilarious. His delivery is deadpan, after a fashion known in times past as frontier humor. Here the amazing feats are ones of outlook and mental construction rather than the muscular exploits of a jumping frog or a steamboat captain. The effect lies in an idiom forever out of sorts with the situation at hand—a subtly nuanced contemporary babble that Saunders captures so well on the page, and even better in this memorable audio production. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
A new story collection from the most playful postmodernist since Donald Barthelme, with narratives that can be enjoyed on a number of different levels. Literature that takes the sort of chances that Saunders does is rarely as much fun as his is. Even when he is subverting convention, letting the reader know throughout that there is an authorial presence pulling the strings, that these characters and their lives don't exist beyond words, he seduces the reader with his warmth, humor and storytelling command. And these are very much stories of these times, filled with economic struggles and class envy, with war and its effects, with drugs that serve as a substitute for deeper emotions (like love) and perhaps a cure (at least temporary) for what one of the stories calls "a sort of vast existential nausea." On the surface, many of these stories are genre exercises. "Escape from Spiderhead" has all the trappings of science fiction, yet culminates in a profound meditation on free will and personal responsibility. One story is cast as a manager's memo; another takes the form of a very strange diary. Perhaps the funniest and potentially the grimmest is "Home," which is sort of a Raymond Carver working-class gothic send-up. A veteran returns home from war, likely suffering from post-traumatic stress. His foulmouthed mother and her new boyfriend are on the verge of eviction. His wife and family are now shacking up with a new guy. His sister has crossed the class divide. Things aren't likely to end well. The opening story, "Victory Lap," conjures a provisional, conditional reality, based on choices of the author and his characters. "Is life fun or scary?" it asks. "Are people good or bad?" The closing title story, the most ambitious here, has already been anthologized in a couple of "best of" annuals: It moves between the consciousness of a young boy and an older man, who develop a lifesaving relationship. Nobody writes quite like Saunders.
