Where to Start with George Saunders: A Reading Guide
Where to start with George Saunders — whether to begin with Tenth of December, Lincoln in the Bardo, or CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. A complete reading guide.
George Saunders (born 1958) is the American fiction writer and essayist whose story collections — CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), Pastoralia (2000), In Persuasion Nation (2006), and Tenth of December (2013) — have established him as the finest short story writer working in contemporary American fiction. His debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), won the Man Booker Prize. Saunders teaches at Syracuse University; his approach to fiction — emphasizing compassion, revision, and the cultivation of attention — is described in his book on writing, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021). His stories are simultaneously satirical (set in corporate dystopias, pharmaceutical testing facilities, gated communities of the near future) and deeply humane: they insist that kindness matters even in, and especially in, systems designed to preclude it.
Where to Start: Tenth of December (2013)
The essential Saunders — and the collection with which to begin. Ten stories, ranging from satirical science fiction to quiet psychological realism, all united by Saunders’s characteristic combination of formal invention, comic intelligence, and moral seriousness. The title story (‘Tenth of December’) is his finest: Don Eber, dying of a brain tumour, has gone to the woods to end his life, and his plan intersects with a troubled, lonely boy named Robin in ways that are funny, frightening, and deeply moving.
Other essential stories: ‘Escape from Spiderhead’ (prisoners in a pharmaceutical testing facility fall in love under the influence of an experimental drug, then learn what the drug costs them); ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’ (a father trying to give his children better things than he had, and the suburban grotesque that results); ‘Victory Lap’ (the point-of-view of a girl being abducted, and a teenage boy who could stop it). Each story demonstrates something different about what Saunders can do; together they make the strongest possible case.
Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)
Saunders’s first novel — and one of the most formally inventive novels in recent American fiction. On the night of February 24, 1862, Abraham Lincoln visited the Georgetown mausoleum to hold the body of his eleven-year-old son Willie, who had died of typhoid. The novel inhabits that night — and the bardo, the Buddhist transitional state between death and rebirth, where the ghosts of Georgetown’s dead are caught in the unfinished business of their lives.
The ghosts narrate in an extraordinary chorus — dozens of voices, each trapped by some attachment to the life they cannot leave — and the novel alternates between their speech and excerpts from historical documents (genuine and invented) describing Lincoln and his era. The grief of a president — private and public simultaneously — is placed against the grief of ordinary people in the bardo, and the result is one of the most affecting novels about loss in recent American fiction. Won the Man Booker Prize in 2017.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996)
Saunders’s debut — the collection that established his reputation and his characteristic mode: satirical science fiction settings (a Civil War theme park, a frontier theme park, a corporate dystopia), rendered in a voice that is comic and appalled in equal measure. The stories are bleaker and more formally rough than his later work — the machinery of the satire is more visible, the compassion less developed — but they are extraordinary for a debut, and they establish the concerns that he would develop across twenty years.
Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where Saunders came from; best read after Tenth of December.
Reading George Saunders
Saunders’s fiction is built on a paradox: the most effective way to render the damage that systems do to human beings is through comedy, and the comedy is only possible because the human beings within the systems are rendered with complete compassion. His satirical settings are vehicles for examining what kindness looks like when the context is designed to prevent it — and what happens when people manage it anyway. Begin with Tenth of December for the fullest and most accomplished demonstration of his gifts; read Lincoln in the Bardo for his most ambitious and most formally inventive work; approach CivilWarLand to understand the origins of his style.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with George Saunders?
Tenth of December (2013) is the best starting point — the story collection that won the Story Prize and was named the best book of 2013 by The New York Times Book Review. The ten stories in this collection demonstrate the full range of Saunders's gifts: satirical science fiction (corporate dystopias, empathy drugs, imaginary theme parks), psychological realism (a man dying of cancer who encounters a troubled boy in the snow), and the formal experimentation that characterizes his best work. Saunders is the finest story writer working in contemporary American fiction, and this collection is his finest demonstration of that claim.
What is Tenth of December about?
Tenth of December (2013) contains ten stories ranging from satirical dark comedy to quiet psychological realism. The title story, 'Tenth of December,' follows a man named Don Eber who is dying of a brain tumour and has gone to the woods to end his life — and a troubled teenage boy named Robin who encounters him there. Other notable stories include 'Escape from Spiderhead' (prisoners in a pharmaceutical testing facility and the drugs that manipulate their feelings), 'The Semplica Girl Diaries' (a family that strings living Third World women as lawn decorations), and 'Victory Lap' (a teenager who witnesses a neighbor girl being abducted). Compassionate, funny, and formally inventive.
What is Lincoln in the Bardo about?
Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) is Saunders's first novel — winner of the Man Booker Prize — set on the night Abraham Lincoln visited the Georgetown mausoleum to hold the body of his recently dead son Willie. The novel is narrated by the ghosts inhabiting the bardo (a Buddhist concept of the transitional state between death and rebirth): dozens of voices, each trapped by their unfinished earthly business, who witness Lincoln's grief and become involved in the fate of Willie's spirit. The novel alternates between historical documents (genuine and invented) describing the period and the ghosts' chorus. Formally unique; deeply moving.
Is George Saunders's fiction satirical or serious?
Saunders's fiction is both — which is what makes him unusual. His satirical settings (corporate theme parks that exploit historical tragedies, pharmaceutical companies that test empathy drugs on prisoners, suburbs where Third World women are used as lawn decorations) are comic in their conception and devastating in their implications. The comedy is never an escape from the seriousness; it is the mode through which the seriousness operates. His work insists that kindness, attention, and moral courage matter even in systems designed to undermine them, and that this insistence is neither naive nor sentimental because it is hard-won against the full weight of the satirical evidence.
