Tenth of December : stories

A brilliant collection of ten short stories from George Saunders – funny, poignant, and touching on things like class, aging, and the dehumanizing aspects of modern science. There is creativity and breadth here, an easy flow to the writing, and great pace. I also liked the excerpt of the

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conversation Saunders had with David Sedaris about the writing process itself that was present in this volume, which also talked about the semi-sacred, near-holy aspect of reading.

Favorites:
Tenth of December – the title story is actually last in the collection, but is so brilliant and memorable that I put at the top of the list. In it, an elderly man with a terminal illness elects to end his (and his family’s) suffering by hiking out into the snow of a deserted area. A boy with an active imagination is also out there, however, and they’re destined to meet. The imaginations of these two people, at such opposite ends of life, their struggles, and the great humanism in how the story plays out were masterful. Considering my own father at the end of his days while reading this was devastating.

Victory Lap – a story of a kidnapping attempt cleverly told through the eyes of three people – a teenage girl (the intended victim), the criminal, and the teenage boy across the street. The boy’s parents are very strict, making the description of his life pretty funny, and we hear their voices in his mind, just as we hear the criminal’s parents’ voices in his. Parenting styles are thus reflected in these people – e.g. probably loving and supporting (resulting in a fanciful imagination and maybe naively opening the door to a stranger), cruel (resulting in cruelty), and ridiculously structured (resulting in rebelling in imagined obscenities but still feeling the heaviness of their instructions within his mind). A very well-executed story.

Puppy – also very well done, and another window into parenting, this time with mom who is fully invested and supportive of her kids (tellingly a reaction to how poor her own mother had been), travelling to look at a puppy that’s up for adoption. Even in how the woman thinks of the playfulness of her husband, and the strength of her faith and optimism, we sense that the kids are in a wonderful family. Once they get to the place with the puppy, however, they get a disturbing glimpse into a family living in filth with a ‘problem child’ chained up in the back, which is quite a contrast. Saunders wisely humanizes the mother in that environment and gives her a lovely thought: “Love was liking someone how he was and doing things to help him get even better,” but still paints a pretty horrifying picture.

Escape from Spiderhead – really enjoyed this one, a tale of near-futuristic experimentation on prisoners, where scientists inject them with advanced drugs to cause specific reactions. We see a broad spectrum of drugs, including one that induce the person to see another as their deepest possible soulmate, and one that causes horrible feelings of pain and depression. I loved it because it hints at how delicate our brain chemistries are, just a little tweak here and there and suddenly our entire outlooks are changed, which rings true, and because it touches on how cruel people can be, thinking they’re acting for the greater good. Well written, and could see this one expanded and made into a film.

The Semplica Girl Diaries – a story that parodies a man through his diary entries, recounting his attempts to be a good parent and to have the better things in life like his daughter’s rich friends. It’s got some of those same elements of humor, but then the horror of what the rich friends have gradually unfolds, giving the story a very dark edge. The only thing that wore on me a bit was the semi-literate narration from the diary entries, which pushed the boundaries of enjoyability given this story’s length, 60 pages.

My Chivalric Fiasco – A janitor at a medieval theme park stumbles across his boss raping a co-worker, and in the effort to insuring his silence, finds himself promoted to playing one of the costumed roles. As part of that role he’s given a designer drug meant to make him speak as a knight would, but it has the side effect that it also makes him more honorable – thus making it hard for him to hold his tongue about the crime. It’s a creative, funny story, and the narration that’s modulated to the drug’s onset and gradual withdrawal is clever.

Others:
Sticks – literally two pages long, detailing a family ritual of decorating a metal pole in the yard, and how it reflects the psyche of the father in increasingly blunt ways as he gets older. An interesting little vignette that speaks to regret and loss, but it would have been nice if it had been further developed.

Exhortation – An email sent to the employees of a company asking them to work harder, where the humor comes from just how non-self-aware the manager is, and how he contradicts himself in his lame attempt to improve morale. Lots of fun probably for anyone who has been in a corporate environment.

Al Roosten – A middle-aged man who runs a failing business volunteers himself for a fundraising auction where people bid on having lunch with him and others, including a more successful and attractive man that he alternately envies, hates, and befriends in his imagination. It’s funny how he consistently sees himself as better than he is, e.g. during the auction or thinking he can become mayor, and so when Saunders shows him thinking he’s better than the homeless, who he refers to as “hobos” and thinks of in an old-fashioned way of stealing pies off windowsills, we see even more how out of touch he is (and how he may become homeless someday).

Home – Probably the least successful story for me; a veteran who was dishonorably discharged returns to his hometown to see his mother, who is living with a deadbeat, and his sister and her husband. While Saunders is talking about class in this story and several others, here it just felt rather dull, and I wish he had delved a little more into the vet’s psyche after what he had seen and taken part in while in the military.

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Story collections are always difficult for me to describe, especially when there isn’t a true central theme. These are wide-ranging tales, dealing with loners, misfits, combat vets, with forays into a creepy Sci-Fi future. Saunders has a bold, innovative style, just this side of quirky. There is

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pain and angst but also a wicked sense of humor. The title story, that deals with a dreamy young boy and a elderly suicidal cancer patient, meeting on a frozen lake, is a stunning piece of work.
Saunders has written several collections and I am looking forward to exploring more of this very talented writer. Here is a taste of his humor from the story “Al Roosten”:

“…as someone who does feng shui for a living, there’s no way I could do feng shui if I was whacked out on crack, because my business is about discerning energy fields, and if you’re cracked up, or on pot, or even if you’ve had too much coffee, the energy field gets all wonky, believe me, I know, I used to smoke.”

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A conflicted young war hero returns home to find his white trash mother being evicted from her house while his ex-wife moves on in life with their kids and rich new husband. A convicted felon placed in an experimental mood-altering program as an alternative to prison seeks a very traditional form

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of escape. Two mothers at different ends of the socio-economic spectrum try to do the best for their families with very different outcomes. Two school classmates—an awkward loner and a popular girl—are brought together in an unexpected way when brutal reality crashes into their lives. A terminal cancer patient goes off into the woods to commit suicide and ends up saving the life of a socially inept young boy who has fallen into a frozen pond.

What do these scenarios have in common? Each of them tells a heart-rending tale of a disenfranchised protagonist coming to grips with the vagaries and disappointments of the real world. They also represent the best parts of ‘Tenth of December’, a collection of nine short stories by George Saunders. Told with compassion, subtlety and occasional humor, these particular tales are compelling and deeply moving. There is a definite tenderness in the way the author draws his characters, but Saunders clearly does not subscribe to theory that good things should happen to good people; these are stories that do not end well.

As good as 'Victory Lap', 'Puppy', 'Escape from Spiderhead', and 'Home' are, however, this is ultimately a very uneven group of stories. By my count, only these four stories are worthy of considerable praise; four of the other five (three of four, in fact, if you dismiss altogether “Sticks”, which checks in at a mere page and a half) are basically forgettable tales that provide little more than filler to an already slim volume. On balance, then, I found reading ‘Tenth of December’ to be a worthwhile experience, if for no other reason that it introduced me to a talented writer with an interesting point of view. I’m just sorry that not everything that Saunders had to say justified the effort.

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Let me start by saying that I did not finish this book. But it was so painful to read the first few stories that I am counting it as a book read. George Saunders is considered a master of the short story by many. Not me. If your definition of mastery is coming up with irritating style quirks and

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topics that no one else would want to write about (let alone read about), then I guess he is a master.

I did not finish the first story, which is about a fantasizing teenager. The overwrought, self-conscious style was just too annoying. The second story, which covered two pages, was about a mean-spirited man whose only joy was dressing two crossed poles in front of the house for the appropriate season. In the end he dies, a young couple buys his house, and the poles are put out in the trash. The end.

It was the third story that did me in. The main character is a woman with two spoiled children and a sicko husband. She is in the habit of bringing home small animals offered to good homes--so that her husband can kill them. A ferret, an iguana, a whole litter of kittens, and now she is considering a puppy. Maybe I'm living in a fantasy world myself, but I do not want to read about people that torture and kill defenseless animals and the people that enable him. That is just SICK!!!

I will not finish this book, and I will never read anything written by George Saunders again.

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This collection of stories starts off in a realistic manner, but about halfway through reverts to Saunders's earlier form: sort of futuristic and sci-fi and zany. But every story is ultimately about human emotion and human connections. These are stories about parent/child and husband/wife

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relationships, and several of them are about how the world of work impinges on those relationships. They are also about how people find value in themselves when almost everyone in their world tells them they have none. Saunders's characters struggle with maintaining their humanity in the face of threats to it from many corners: from violent strangers, coercive work situations, cruel punishments, and debilitating diseases. Their struggles are moving to read, and while the stories sometimes verge on the falsely sentimental, for the most part, Saunders pulls it off.

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There is a healthy dose of irony in these wildly inventive stories, along with more than a hint of whimsy. George Saunders' 2013 collection Tenth of December gives us ten tales that trace the fortunes of people who find themselves in highly unusual and often pressure-packed situations, to which

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they react instinctively because of a behavioural tic of one sort or another or because they don’t have time to consider the likely consequences of their actions. In "Victory Lap," a boy who seems to operate under an absurdly strict set of household rules foils an attempted abduction of a neighbour's daughter, leaping into danger and acting valiantly despite his ambivalence and his expectation of punishment for breaking the restrictions imposed by his parents. In the title story, another boy risks his life in a rescue attempt, then ends up needing to be rescued himself, but still manages to find a way to help the man he'd tried to rescue in the first place. In “Escape from Spiderhead” a man who is subject to experiments in which his behaviour is chemically manipulated discovers a way to escape his tormenters. And “The Semplica Girl Diaries” is narrated in the form of a journal kept by a husband and father living in American suburbia at some future point in time where it has become acceptable for girls from impoverished foreign countries to be brought to the US and kept as lawn ornaments. Each of these stories is told in urgent, fast-paced, slightly off-kilter prose. George Saunders’ most common strategy is, with little or no set up, to plunge his reader into the mind of his character, where in the absence of narrative cues we might flounder for a page or two before figuring out what’s going on. The effect is disorienting and bracing. To be sure, these stories are frequently very funny. Saunders has an uncanny knack for mimicking the vernacular speech of a range of character types. More often than not his people are uneducated and unsophisticated, their needs and desires simple and of the moment. However, one finishes the book with a sense that what you have just read is somewhat inconsequential. For all the artistry of the prose and the impressive narrative pyrotechnics, the stories lack emotional punch and don’t seem to lead anywhere. We’re entertained by their antics, but because of their often pronounced eccentricities we can’t connect with Saunders’ characters beyond the most superficial level. Without a doubt Tenth of December is a book that’s worth reading, but don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t stick with you.

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No doubt the stories are all extremely well-written, thought-provoking, and terse to the core. However, they are all really really bleak. I had to reread at least half of the stories to really get the understanding and then even after that the "SG" story totally escaped me. Is there something wrong

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when you have to read reviews to understand what you just read?

Read the book for a book club, and will admit, I'm glad I did. Short stories are not my cup of tea, but this did make me stretch my reading. Sometimes, like stretching a muscle, it was painful, but in the end, probably worth the time to do. Will I seek out books by this author, probably not. Can say I've been there, done that.

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None of the stories in this collection are bad, but the only one I found impressive was the last of them, the one that gives the collection its name. This is the first thing I've read by Saunders, so I don't know if this is his schtick in everything he writes, but nearly every story in this

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collection featured the inner lives/thoughts of the characters, written in a colloquial, stream of consciousness style. It's a fine gimmick, I suppose, but too often it seems as though it's the only thing that Saunders is doing with a story, and the gimmick isn't strong enough to support a story on its own.

Analysis of specific stories:

The curiously named Victory Lap is essentially just the inner lives of the three characters as they respond to/participate in an attempted kidnapping. It establishes the individual thoughts and concerns of the three characters, each of which is distinct, and brings the attempted kidnapping to a resolution, but that's all the story does: there doesn't seem to be a message here, or even a resolution for any of the three characters involved, just three characters with very different ways of thinking and seeing the world coming into conflict, and then the story ends. To me a story would have to do something more to be of note.

Sticks is an interesting little vignette of about two pages in length. It's good for what it is, but what it is doesn't have much substance.

Puppy is again the inner lives of the two main characters, their inner lives shaping how they see the world and how they behave toward each other. One character's past means she accepts the bad behavior of her children and sees the other main character as an agent of cruelty committing inhuman acts. The other characters thoughts and concerns paint her life and actions in too forgiving a light, justifying things that perhaps shouldn't be justified. These are two slightly less complex characters than the three from Victory Lap, but they're interacting in a more complex way, so on balance it's about an equally interesting example of Saunders' style.

Escape from Spiderhead is an average pulp sci-fi story, not something that I expected to find in this collection. The premise of people being emotionally controlled through drugs is hardly original, but the ending actually is quite interesting. This is the first of several stories in this collection where Saunders hides something from the reader that all the characters of the story are in on (here it's the past of the main character), a literary device I think is lazy and more irritating than interesting. Overall a solid story thanks to the ending.

I found Exhortation to be a completely pointless story, one that again hides the ball about what the organization is doing- something vaguely sinister, with a few other details being gradually thrown in and a fuzzy picture eventually forming. What was Saunders trying to say with this story? That bland corporate speak and overused platitudes can be used even for ominous situations? That horrors can be perpetrated by bureaucracies? More like George Yawnders, amirite? But seriously, this is no Penal Colony.

Al Roosten explores the inner life of a failing businessman going about his day, who has delusions of grandeur and a propensity to imagine scenarios where he's the hero, or at least where things work out for him. It's not the most original character, but Saunders writes it well. Still, the inner thoughts thing had lost some of its charm by this point in the collection.

The Semplica Girl Diaries explores the inner life of the main character in a slightly different format, through journal entries of the main character. Diaries satirizes the American dream, but it's not at all subtle, and again Saunders hides the ball about what SGs are for far longer than necessary.

Home is probably the second best story in the collection, giving us the inner life of a man just discharged from the military who is returning home to his mess of a family situation. It's pretty funny, especially the repeated mantra of "thank you for your service." Again Saunders hides the ball with what the main character did in the military, but it was interesting enough to piece together the relationships he has with all the other characters that I'll give it a pass. Solid story.

My Chivalric Fiasco, on the other hand, I didn't find funny at all, though I think that was the tone Saunders was going for. It's again the examination of a man's inner thoughts as he goes about his job at a renaissance fair type operation, the climax of which is him taking medication that makes him think, speak, and behave as though he was a noble guard from a tale of chivalry. After Spiderhead already used the idea of drugs that effect people's thoughts, including their inner monologues, seeing the device get reused here struck me as lazy: let's stick to one use of that per collection, shall we?

Tenth of December uses the same exploration of the inner thoughts of the characters as nearly every other story, but lo and behold actually combines that with interesting events taking place, where the inner thoughts feed into the action which feeds into more inner thoughts which feeds into more action, etc. in a way that didn't occur in any of the other stories. There's also a real resolution, where one of the main characters realizes it's not his place to deprive his family of him through suicide, even if Alzheimer's will effectively mean the end of the real him in the near future. Tenth of December feels like Saunders actually putting together pieces in a satisfying way that none of the other stories did. While not absolutely amazing, it's good, and the best of the collection.


So one good story, a couple other solid ones, and a bunch of unremarkable ones made even worse by Saunders repeatedly visiting the same well of literary devices and writing style. Overall a middling collection. Saunders needs to write more stories like Tenth of December, where something is actually done with the exploration of the inner life of the characters, instead of featuring that device as the end of the story in itself.

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"The best book you'll read this year."

That is a particularly bold statement for a reviewer to make in early January, but it is exactly what the New York Times had to say about Tenth of December, the new short story collection from George Saunders. That certainly grabbed my attention - especially

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since, to that point, I had never even heard of George Saunders. Saunders, the author of several previous short story collections, it seems, is hitting mainstream public awareness in a very big way.

There are ten stories in the collection, each of them memorable in its own way. Most readers, I suspect, unless they encounter the stories in a self-contained unit like this collection, would not guess that they had been written by the same author. The stories are that different from one other in style, tone, and theme. Included, are darkly futuristic stories, stories written from the points-of-view of children, stories about class differences, and stories of despair and redemption.

Saunders tells ten stories in 250 pages, and the longest story in the book accounts for 60 of those pages, with the shortest being only 2 pages long. So, on average, the stories are just over 20 pages each - but what stories, they are. They might be short, but they tackle life's big questions, especially those pertaining to morality, life and death, and what makes each of us tick.

The book opens with a story called "Victory Lap," in which a timid teenager struggles with the real-time decision of whether or not to go to the aid of the girl next door as she struggles with an intruder. Should he get involved or not? Will anyone ever know if he just walks away and pretends he never saw a thing? The boy's hesitance might be shocking, even a bit disgusting, but by story's end, Saunders has used his skills to, at the very least, turn the young man into an understandable – and sympathetic - character. In the process of reading "Victory Lap," one even begins to question how he might react in the same situation.

Some stories work better than others, of course, but I suspect that each of the ten will be the favorite of some percentage of the book's readers because the stories speak to the reader in a very personal sense. My own favorite is the book's title story about a little boy whose real and fantasy worlds almost seamlessly blend together. Yet, against all odds, in a chance encounter with a stranger, the boy gives a terminally ill (and suicidal) man reason to carry on by calling upon the inner strength the man had long forgotten he ever had.

Eight of these ten stories strike me as being somewhere between very good and outstanding. Tenth of December may, or it may not, turn out to be the best book I will read in 2013. It is way too early for that - but I do thank the New York Times for bringing it to my attention as, otherwise, I would almost certainly have missed it (proving that sensationalistic headlines are not necessarily a bad thing, I suppose).

Rated at: 4.0

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This is an absolutely fantastic collection of short stories. I'm actually feeling a little frustrated at myself because I find I'm completely unable to articulate, even to myself, just how and why Saunders' writing is so good. If I say that his writing is simple on the surface but digs down deep

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into human nature, that makes it sound kind of boring and pretentious, doesn't it? And completely fails to convey how very readable it is, or how laced with humor. But saying that makes it sound sort of pleasant and light, and it's definitely not that at all. So... I don't know. I guess I'll just say that Saunders clearly understands human beings, with all our strengths and weaknesses and loves and self-delusions and absurdities, and that, man, he can write. And also that I really need to go find everything else he ever published sometime soon.

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Any review of a book like this has to start with a review of the hype surrounding it, which was perhaps a little over the top. I understand that publishers need to, want to, market their books as widely as possible; I understand that one way of doing this is to get big names to write gushing blurbs

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("A complete original... no one better... best since Twain...") But what the blurbs should really say is: "George Saunders' body of work is tremendous, and does exactly what it sets out to do; be aware, dear reader, that he isn't trying to do what other authors are."

The zenith/nadir of the 'I bought the book because I heard about it on NPR and Jennifer Egan said he was great' surely came with the goodreads review which suggested that Saunders ought to read more Jim Harrison, and that that would sort him out. Reverse the names for some sense of how ridiculous that statement is. Different books are doing different things, and we should be glad about that.

Anyway, actual book review: I was suspicious going in, because there's just no way that the author of such amazing stories as 'Jon' should be getting big-upped in the way this book is. My suspicions were seemingly confirmed by the opening stories: Victory Lap, Sticks and Puppy were indeed a long way from my favorite Saunders stories. The rest of the book was much more on than off, but on balance, I thought this was his weakest collection. But, on the upside, I now realize more clearly what I value in his work.

Almost all short stories traffic in emotional impact and affect. That's fine, that's what they're out to do, and that's why I don't read many short story collections. Saunders, it turns out, is different because the emotional impact of his best stories comes not from the emotions of the characters, but from engaging, intellectually, with the work itself. For instance:

'In Persuasion Nation' has as its main, emotion bearing character a polar bear who is thwacked in the head with an axe, then wakes up the next day all okay, only to be thwacked again. At the end of the story, he discovers God/the possibilities of social change. This is not a good set up for an emotional climax. But because of the way Saunders links his story into the world depicted in advertising, and the way we ourselves live in that world, and the difficulties of avoiding it, the story makes me get all rheumy eyed.

Now, compare the title story of 10thD:

An imaginative young loser goes into the forest where he pretends to rescue the cutest girl in his class from imaginary beings. At the same time, an old man with Alzheimer's like symptoms has gone into the forest to kill himself. The boy sees the man's coat and tries to give it to him, only to fall into a frozen lake. The man sees the boy and decides he has to rescue him. Both end up living. Here, the emotional impact of the story is unearned: how the hell else do you end a story about those characters *except* with emotional oomph? It's hard to go wrong.*

And, unfortunately for me, 10thD has much more of this unearned emotional oomph, and much less of the fascinating, acidic, intellectually difficult emotional oomph. Part of that is just that the stories here focus on The Family, and how the parental urge to protect children can often lead us to do very silly things that might even hurt our children (leaving them unprepared to deal with the 'real world,' or with grief, burdening them with insupportable levels of guilt as we try to give them 'normal' childhoods, destroying other relationships in order to protect them from 'danger,' killing ourselves to save them from the horrors of an Alzheimer symptom ridden old man). Compare that to Saunders' other stories, which are much more about public life or work, and lean more obviously towards the intellectually emotional.

And, sad to say, the stories I like here are mostly re-runs of older stories. 'Escape from Spiderhead' is more or less a rerun of 'Jon'; 'My Chivalric Fiasco' combines his working in a parody of a theme park stories with his mind control stories; 'Exhortation' is a kind of concentrate of the ridiculous corporate jargon stories. Nothing wrong with revisiting good themes (work/commodification/destruction of the English language/generalized injustice). But these stories aren't as good as the similar stories in his earlier books.

In sum: this is a less taut, wetter, sloppier, more manipulative and sadly generic book of short stories. And all that said, it's still 10 times better than most books of short stories. You should read it if you care for what he's trying to do, and you should, since it's much more interesting and important and entertaining than pretty much everything else... but read it only after you've read his other books.

If you just want the traditional short-story emotional whup upside your head, it's available elsewhere.


* Not to say it's easy to write that story, and Saunders does it very well; I didn't feel manipulated or backed into a corner as I was reading it, although I do now that I'm reflecting on it.

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Judging from all the commentary, George Saunders is--and has been--the most significant American writer that I've never heard of. His name didn't even ring a bell, but the reviews I skimmed treat him on par with Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut.

The collection of his stories in The

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Tenth of December fell somewhat short of the hype, but only somewhat. The stories are funny, the language is fresh, the shifting perspectives of the narration in many of the stories interesting, and many of the stories were well constructed with clear denouements or twists or other forms of resolution (unlike Karen Russell's first collection of stories, for example).

The thematic consistencies between the stories are also interesting, including mind altering drugs, amusement parks, soulless corporations and bureaucracies, and misfits/loners functioning in that environment. A couple of the stories were particularly striking: Victory Lap (shifting in perspective between a light-headed teenage girl, a mentally deranged attempted rapist, and a boy next store debating whether to intervene), Escape from Spiderhead (about experiments with mind-altering drugs on prisoners, alternating between intense love/happiness drugs and deeply depressing ones), The Semplica Girl Diaries (about a lower-middle class family that wins the lottery and in an attempt to keep up with their neighbors buys a set of what are called SGs, which are third world refugees who are strung up as lawn ornaments), My Chivalric Fiasco (about a worker at a medieval recreation given a drug to make him think/talk like a knight and the fiasco that follows, the language in this one is particularly fun), and the Tenth of December (shifting in perspective between a man trying to drown himself and an imaginative boy who almost drowns believing he is going to save him, but then needs to be saved in turn).

The stories, however, transcend humor and satire to present a compelling vision of very real, very humane characters who are struggling to function in the very difficult world around them.

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Astonishingly assured writing of characters so hesitant and fragile that your heart breaks for them. This is George Saunders at his best. With stories so lean that each individual word is vitally important. And even the nuance is nuanced.

Every story in this collection deserves mention as both

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typical of Saunders’ earlier style, and adventurously striking new ground. With “Escape from Spiderhead” and “My Chivalric Fiasco” we see the satirical Saunders’ alternate future, complete with chemically induced mood, emotion and diction. These are at once lighter than some of his previous satires but perhaps (or because of that) even more cutting. A Saunders protagonist may hope for, even expect, at least within in his own mind, the world to bend itself to his needs and goals, but will find himself almost invariably brought back to reality, or lower, when the world insists on its own integrity.

Saunders is a master of the exorbitant monologue, here represented by “Exhortation” and “The Semplica Girl Diaries”, or the sad sack “Al Roosten”. But perhaps even more impressive are the stories which function as dualistic monologues—not dialogues, to be sure, but rather alternating monologues. Both the opening, shockingly surprising, story, “Victory Lap”, and the concluding title story, “Tenth of December”, take this form. The latter must surely stand as one of the finest, saddest, and bravest short stories I have ever encountered. With characters so vulnerable, so susceptible to destruction by themselves and others, only Saunders’ love for them can sustain them, even help them succeed beyond their own imaginings.

The writing is so swift and spare that a story almost sweeps past you. So take the opportunity to read it again and you will find that you will want to read it yet again, even. Highly recommended.

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An innovative writer, George Saunders uses crisp, stripped-down language and places understated characters in strange settings and situations to provide unsentimental and often hilarious stories of the human condition.

I found it interesting that this book places the only two somewhat upbeat stories in the collection at the beginning and the end, as if the editor thought that doing this might help to disguise the unremitting darkness of the stories that make up most of the book. I'm afraid the effect is more

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along the lines of a gloom sandwich, in which the relatively upbeat slices of bread do little to mask the depressive filling.

Of course, my reaction is largely a matter of personal taste. I think George Saunders is a remarkable writer and a true artist, but for me, there's just too much darkness and ugliness in this collection to stomach.

Some notes on selected stories:

"Victory Lap" is the opening story, and therefor one of the two fairly upbeat pieces I mentioned. It indulges in an engaging playfulness with language (as do most of the stories in this collection, to some extent), but apart from that I found it a story with unrealistic characters in an unrealistic situation that comes to an unrealistic conclusion.

"Puppies" extends that playfulness with language into the realm of just-plain-hard-to-read. I was reminded of a recent quote from Booker Prize judge Peter Strothard, stating that literary works of art "have to offer a degree of resistance." This story offers resistance in spades, and in return for chewing through that resistance you get one of the most gruelingly dark stories I've ever read. In this story and a few others, it feels to me that Saunders is approaching outright sadism toward his characters.

"Escape from Spiderhead" is another example of this. It's a piece of dark-science-fiction-meets-literary-fiction of the sort that would have been at home in a "New Wave" SF anthology of the late 60s such as Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions. I think the darkness might be a bit too heavy even for Harlan Ellison's taste, however.

"Home" continues the grim and depressing tone, but for a change I felt it had a sense of genuine human life amidst the darkness. I found it reminiscent of Raymond Carver, though not distilled down to its concentrated 150-proof essence the way Carver would have done.

"Tenth of December" was selected for this year's Best American Short Stories, and I think it's the best piece in this book. It's the final story, and like "Victory Lap," somewhat less depressing than the bulk of the collection. It's also cleverly crafted and has two interesting main characters. But it's notable that one of the most cheerful stories in this book has a terminal cancer patient as one of its protagonists.

After reading this collection I have a lot of respect for Saunders as a writer, and I know from other stories of his that he can be somewhat upbeat and even comic. But from now on I'll approach everything he writes with a deep wariness, afraid that at any moment it might explode into a smothering pall of gloom and despair.

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Oh, man, this book. This book. Wham. Pow. Right in the feels.

I expected this to be similar to Pastoralia, which is to say, merely okay. Nope. This is outstanding. Every single story is outstanding.

...Now I need to go hug my cat for while.

So he’s been around for awhile, but then it’s 2013 and you start seeing him all over. A soft-spoken, quietly intelligent guy, sort of longish hair and glasses, half smile, with that unremarkable name of George Saunders. There he is again. Doing interviews on NPR, talking to folks on the PBS

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NewsHour, sitting around with Stephen Colbert…whoa, a heck of a big splash in the New York Times… for god’s sake, who IS this guy?

Turns out that he is a deft wizard, an inspiration. He is praised and admired by a quite a list - D. Eggers, K. Russell, J. Franzen, S. Vowell, T. Wolff, T. Pynchon, J. Ferris, Z. Smith, D. F. Wallace... So why not, I started reading some of his stories. Then I read Tenth of December and now I love him. You should read him too.

You want funny ha-ha, he’s got those stories. You want short and semi-sweet, he’s got those covered. Great social satire, oh gosh yes. I imagine K. Vonnegut watching over him from whatever afterlife he’s inhabiting. Bit of sci-fi futuristic, sure! He’s got those and they are very good, my favorite in fact. How about ‘punch you in the heart so you end up thinking about them for days afterward’? Yeah, he’s got those too.

George Saunders spins these things out of his brain like fireflies and after he catches them, he sets them loose inside your head. People that inhabit his little universes are real folks, true in dialect and recognizable in face, not always pretty. He can and does make me care about what happens to them and bless his heart, he allows some of them to be heroes.

I’m telling you, check him out. So rich, so comic, so crazy, deceptively simply perfect stories in anywhere from 2 to 10 to 60 pages. How does he do it? Wouldn’t we all love to know, anybody who just longs to get it right, down on paper, make it live and breathe with only mere words. P.S. to Mr. Saunders: Thanks and please keep writing.

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The Short Story is not my thing. Actually, there are a lot of "not my things" in regards to reading. I am so picky, and demand so much in an author, that I embarrass myself. It is apparent by the reviews that I am not the only one who notes that Saunders writes in a way that captivates most

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audiences. Similar to the way that Stephen King captures his readers, Saunders takes the naked word and strings them together with simplicity and a uniqueness that reaches a wide span of readers. In The Tenth of December, this talent shines through as Saunders donates "slices of life" to the reader. He has the ability, during the course of a ten minute short story, to introduce, evolve, and bring closure to his characters within their moment in time. The first selection, for example, addresses the most intense and sensitive subject out there. Yet, Saunders somehow manages to amuse the reader while maintaining reverance to the subject matter, and allows the characters we have grown to love (in 10 minutes!) to triumph in the end.

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I felt like I had to read this book given the fact that every publishing related bit of email or Facebook update was talking about that book. I'd never heard of him, and kind of went into the book with a attitude of "this had better hold up to the hype". It did. It really did. While what he writes

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about is "out there" in a lot of ways, and was often miles away from my comfort zone, I hung in there because the writing was so wonderful. He took me to horrible places with beautiful words, leaving me with a notion that I should say thank you for the experience. I think of one of the stories, "Escape from Spiderhead", just about every day. It taught me a whole new dimension in horror, introduced me to a hideous but terrifyingly plausible future. And the whole book taught me the quality of Saunder's work, another thing I will not forget.

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Enjoyed some of these stories ire than others, but they were all crafted well of course…enjoy his writing on writing more than his writing? Hah!!

Really enjoyable! I hardly recall ever reading anything this quickly.

Saunders is a master at realistically (how would I know, though?) capturing the chaotic and often illogical inner voices that people talk to themselves with. This book was so compulsively readable precisely because the words on

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the pages are so alike the voice that everyone is most familiar with; their own, in their head.

The stories, ranging from contemporary to futuristic, build up a sense of unease in the reader. In almost every one, one realizes from the start that something is looming beneath the surface, about to be revealed. In others, everything already seems to be out in the open; the protagonist just has to come to terms with it.

I don't refer specifically to the stories because if I would then I'd probably only focus on those that moved me the most; Victory Lap, Puppy, Escape from Spiderhead, Al Roosten, and Tenth of December. While Saunders is often funny as hell, this collection stood out to me because of the feeling I got while reading when the author managed to capture all that can go wrong in modern life, or perhaps, life in all ages, past and yet to come.

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A fine collection of carefully crafted, grin inducing stories. "Escape from spiderhead" and "semplica girl diaries" are my favorites because they include a touch of the philosophical and speculative, where I think Saunders is at his best. I had read Saunders before in the New Yorker but only

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recently discovered he was a professor at Syracuse university.

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I didn't find any of the stories in this collection to be all that compelling. They are certainly well written, but they lacked that stick with you factor I look for in a short story. I glancing through the glossary again I can't honestly remember what most of these stories were about, with the

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exception of the Title Story.

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This collection of short stories is deceptively simple and then broadens into a collection which will stick with you for quite a while. Plots include returning veterans,a suicidal man saving a boy's life and consequently his own, a world where drugs can induce and reduce any emotional state

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desired, and more. If pressed to find the thematic thread which connects them, I think it is both the fear and reality of loss of self. Very good read!

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