His story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2007. In 2006 he won the World Fantasy Award for his short story 'CommComm'. In 2006 Saunders received a MacArthur Fellowship. His first story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), was a finalist for that year's PEN/Hemingway Award. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardian until October 2008.Ī professor at Syracuse University, Saunders won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and second prize in the O.

His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's and GQ.

George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas and children's books. Currently-teaches at Syracuse University.Awards-4 National Magazine Awards PEN/Malamud Award World Fantasy Award Story Prize.Education-B.S., Colorado School of Mines M.A., Syracuse University.These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human. ( From the publisher.) Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. In 'Home,' a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned.Īnd in the title story, a stunning meditation on imagination, memory, and loss, a middle-aged cancer patient walks into the woods to commit suicide, only to encounter a troubled young boy who, over the course of a fateful morning, gives the dying man a final chance to recall who he really is.Ī hapless, deluded owner of an antiques store two mothers struggling to do the right thing a teenage girl whose idealism is challenged by a brutal brush with reality a man tormented by a series of pharmaceutical experiments that force him to lust, to love, to kill-the unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders’s signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation. In the taut opener, 'Victory Lap,' a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act? One of the most important and blazingly original writers of his generation, George Saunders is an undisputed master of the short story, and Tenth of December is his most honest, accessible, and moving collection yet.

Tenth of december book review