george saunders

(just realised it's old, new to me tho)

thx

Love his response here:

Interviewer: So much of your fiction is charged with social import. Given our recent political upheavals, have you ever thought of writing overt political satire?

Saunders: I'm not very interested in that kind of satire because it works on the assumption that They Are Assholes. Fiction works on the assumption that They Are Us, on a Different Day.

..which relates back to his notion of compassion/satire not being mutually exclusive earlier in the interview.

Great interview (I love "Escape from Spiderhead" too): http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/12/george-saunderss-wild-ride.html

If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he’s made of sugar.

"Isabelle" is as stupendous a story as I'm aware of from the last 40 years or so. Blunt and pure.

― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Friday, September 9, 2005

Unexpected! I just discovered him. I realized I'd read "The Falls" in The New Yorker some years ago. Anyway, "Isabelle" is terrific.

where have you guys been!

haha i was like shit yeah i'm ahead of alfred on something

alfred that was quick! did you buy civilwarland today or something?

New book of stories, "Tenth of December," is aces.

Well, newish, not out til January but I have a review copy.

She took my face in her hands and turned my head so I was looking in the window at Ryan, who was heating a bottle at the kitchen sink.
“Does that look like a hitter?” she said.
“No,” I said.
And it didn’t. Not at all.
“Jesus,” I said. “Does anybody tell the truth around here?”
“I do,” she said. “You do.”
I looked at her and for a minute she was eight and I was ten and we were hiding in the doghouse while Ma and Dad and Aunt Toni, on mushrooms, trashed the patio.

profile in the nyt magazine - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/magazine/george-saunders-just-wrote-the-best-book-youll-read-this-year.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

That's a great link. Thanks.

i don't know about 'the best book you'll read this year'

i mean, i'm brining war and peace to the hospital next week

salt war tol.

This is sitting on my table right now. I sort of have to wait for my gf to finish reading it first but still, stoked.

i don't know about 'the best book you'll read this year'

I've surely mentioned before the reviewer quoted on rhe blurb of Mason & Dixon, which came out, what, 2001? who said "If there's a better book this decade, I'll literally eat my hat."

Actually, for me, M&D might save this reviewer all sorts of gustatory indignities, which in no wise reduces the absurdity of the comment.

looking forward to reading this anyway.

I think it's actually "if America produces a novel better than this all decade, I promise to eat it" - I think Mason & Dixon came out in 1998 so that was a pretty safe bet at that point in the decade, but then again it was Philip Hensher and anything that makes him uncomfortable is okay by me.

It is that, thanks. Never let every single crucial detail about an anecdote being wrong put you off trying to tell it.

Matt DC, what have you got against Philip Hensher particularly? (i ask from a totally agnostic p.o.v. - never read a word of his fiction, enjoyed the odd review of his in the spectator, remember reading an unsolicited letter in private eye which testified to at least one moment of decency)

oh and looking forward to the new saunders, even tho i think it's all been downhill since Civilwarland...

Ward Fowler - I was just being facetious really, I find Hensher's writing style irritating and I didn't enjoy The Northern Clemency, but that's about the extent of it. I'm willing to believe he's a good guy really who's on the right side of many important issues.

I enjoy his reviews in the spectator and i think he's smart and funny, if a little conceited, but i can't get myself interested in reading any of his novels

Is anyone else weirded out that Saunders is inadvertently responsible for the Geico caveman? (and by extension the short-lived Geico caveman sitcom)

seems entirely appropriate to me.

based on the nytimes piece I am extremely anticipating reading this dude's work. slogging through the last quarter of the book I'm on now, _John Dies at the End_...

I'd recommend starting at the start

what's up with that civilwarland reissue, does that exist yet

I want: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/books/review/tenth-of-december-by-george-saunders.html?ref=books

started civilwarland...title story is fantastic, as is the 400 lb CEO. The rest, so far, are a bit too much like Brautigan or Pynchon to be enjoyable to my taste. Then again I was pretty drunk when reading, so maybe I should go back.

guess i'd read all? of 10th of dec previously in the nyer but they were valuable to re-read imo

am currently watching him on charlie rose

I totally lost my shit at the title story in Tenth of December.

enjoyed pastoralia a lot but could not make it through several stories from persuasion nation

which ones?

http://www.theawl.com/2013/02/real-as-hell-a-conversation-with-george-saunders

^ great

I just finished Pastoralia, which is my second Saunders book. I think "Sea Oak" is one of the best short stories I have ever read. I have been wanting to talk about it with somebody, but my wife, a Joycian who doesn't read anything written after 1945, refuses to read postmodern fiction of any kind, at least until she finishes her dissertation (which is fair). So happy to have this thread, then, and nabisco's great posts, which are some of my favorite posts I've read on ILX. It was great to read such an articulate analysis of Saunders' use of language, and why it's so effective:

there's a rich uncle who spouts optimistic banalities about hard work in such a way that you feel he believes it, you understand him -- and even better, when the aunt's grave is desecrated, Saunders pegs the entire role of the policeman simply by putting question marks at the end of his sentences. (I wish I had the book here to quote: I think he says "Typically we find it's teens?" and in that question mark you hear everything -- the desire to be helpful and reassuring, and the complete powerlessness to actually be helpful and reassuring.)

The FIRPO story really got to me, too. It was like a Carver story narrated by the doomed child instead of the unhappy parents of the doomed child. "Winky" and the one about the barber were just ok, but I really loved the rest.

Anyway, I've read CivilWarLand In Bad Decline (though it's been years and I think I want to read it again; someone gave it to me as a gift a long time ago in an attempt to get me to quit reading Sedaris), and now, Pastoralia. Which one next?

Diminishing returns? I'm half way into The Tenth of December and finding it not good and his concerns and ticks too repetitive. I mean, I know it's apt to have a character think an absurd or mundane thought then think "ha ha" and wrote that but he's used it in every story bar one so far. And the ending of "escape from the spiderhead" is the exact ending he's used in two stories in previous collections. People have spoken highly of" the semplica girl diaries" but I couldn't really believe the idea of the SGs in the first place and then the story tails off in a not very interesting way rather than actually ending. There are a few like that too. The only story I thought was good thus far was the two page one called "Sticks".

I enjoyed the narrative language of the SG diaries but couldn't actually work out what it had to do with the character of the narrator and spent the first half of the story thinking of the zen koans on t-shirts thread on I'll and thought the narrator was meant to me writing in a second language. Didn't really make any sense to me, anyway.

On ilx not I'll

escape from spiderhead is pretty bad -- takes a bunch of themes he's done before, makes the real-life parallels obvious, puts in a christian sacrifice at the ending. i liked most of the others.

i don't even remember spiderhead. is it the one with the old dude trying to kill himself? i liked that one. i didn't like most of the others.

i think i liked it best of his books, the writing is very virtuoso

that's the worst thing about it

that doesnt make any sense

spiderhead = testing emotion drugs on people

i. i think saunders is worse now that the purpose of each sentence is not to communicate the interiority of the american lower-middle and working classes and instead to communicate how good george saunders is at communicating the interiority of etc.
ii. there's been a real flattening of idea and of sentiment that's gone along with this

though i think 'tenth' is probably less bad than the one that came out when i was an undergraduate, which i overrated at the time, because of how i was an undergraduate

the semplica girl diaries is--to use a phrase which seems to be becoming so much popular on ilx that we could probably abbreviate it--a little too on the nose