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.
