NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “One of our most inventive purveyors of the form returns with
pitch-perfect genre-bending stories that stare into the abyss of our national character. . . .
An exquisite work from a writer whose reach is galactic.”— Oprah Daily Booker Prize winner
George Saunders returns with his first collection of short stories since the New York Times
bestseller Tenth of December. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book
Review The New Yorker Oprah Daily NPR Time USA Today The Guardian Esquire Newsweek
Kirkus Reviews Booklist Library Journal The “best short-story writer in English” ( Time )
is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power ethics and justice and cuts
to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his
trademark prose—wickedly funny unsentimental and exquisitely tuned—Saunders continues to
challenge and surprise: Here is a collection of prismatic resonant stories that encompass joy
and despair oppression and revolution bizarre fantasy and brutal reality. “Love Letter” is a
tender missive from grandfather to grandson in the midst of a dystopian political situation in
the (not too distant all too believable) future that reminds us of our obligations to our
ideals ourselves and one another. “Ghoul” is set in a Hell-themed section of an underground
amusement park in Colorado and follows the exploits of a lonely morally complex character
named Brian who comes to question everything he takes for granted about his reality. In
“Mother’s Day ” two women who loved the same man come to an existential reckoning in the middle
of a hailstorm. In “Elliott Spencer ” our eighty-nine-year-old protagonist finds himself
brainwashed his memory “scraped”—a victim of a scheme in which poor vulnerable people are
reprogrammed and deployed as political protesters. And “My House”—in a mere seven pages—comes
to terms with the haunting nature of unfulfilled dreams and the inevitability of decay.
Together these nine subversive profound and essential stories coalesce into a case for
viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention Saunders does even in the
most absurd of circumstances.
