George Saunders

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

   PDF

2. “A Job to Do”*: George Saunders on, and at, Work

   • Kasia Boddy

   Pages 1-22

3. Horning In: Language, Subordination and Freedom in the Short Fiction of George Saunders

   • Clare Hayes-Brady

   Pages 23-39

4. Language Between Lyricism and Corporatism: George Saunders’s New Sincerity

   • Adam Kelly

   Pages 41-58

5. “Hope that, in Future, All Is well”: American Exceptionalism and Hopes for Resistance in Two Stories by George Saunders

   • Gillian Elizabeth Moore

   Pages 59-75

6. Hanging by a Thread in the Homeland: The Four Institutional Monologues of George Saunders

   • Richard E. Lee

   Pages 77-104

7. Biopolitical Dystopias, Bureaucratic Carnivores, Synthetic Primitives: “Pastoralia” as Human Zoo

   • David Huebert

   Pages 105-120

8. Ghosts and Theme Parks: The Supernatural and the Artificial in George Saunders’s Short Stories

   • Dana Del George

   Pages 121-135

9. The Absent Presence of the Deus Absconditus in the Work of George Saunders

   • Aidan Cottrell-Boyce

   Pages 137-151

10. Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction

    • Michael Basseler

    Pages 153-171

11. Cruel Inventions: George Saunders’s Literary Darkenfloxx™

    • Jurrit Daalder

    Pages 173-188

12. Dreaming and Realizing “The Semplica Girl Diaries”: A Post-Jungian Reading

    • Steve Gronert Ellerhoff

    Pages 189-204

13. Everyday Zombies: Ethics and the Contemporary in “Sea Oak” and “Brad Carrigan, American”

    • Michael Trussler

    Pages 205-219

14. “Third-person Ventriloquism”: Microdialogues and Polyphony in George Saunders’s “Victory Lap”

    • Robert Cameron Wilson

    Pages 221-235

15. “A Little at a Time. And Iteratively”: A Conversation with George Saunders

    • Steve Gronert Ellerhoff

    Pages 237-243

16. Back Matter

    Pages 245-292

    PDF

This timely volume explores the signal contribution George Saunders has made to the development of the short story form in books ranging from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) to Tenth of December (2013). The book brings together a team of scholars from around the world to explore topics ranging from Saunders’s treatment of work and religion to biopolitics and the limits of the short story form. It also includes an interview with Saunders specially conducted for the volume, and a preliminary bibliography of his published works and critical responses to an expanding and always exciting creative œuvre. Coinciding with the release of the Saunders’ first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), George Saunders: Critical Essays is the first book-length consideration of a major contemporary author’s work. It is essential reading for anyone interested in twenty-first century fiction.

• George Saunders
• Tenth of December
• Pastoralia
• Thomas Pynchon
• Short Story
• American Literature

“An indispensable guide to one of the freshest and most innovative writers of the 21st century.  The wide-ranging contributions from a team of international scholars capture the energy of George Saunders’s genre-busting prose, both introducing new readers to the work and offering new insights to enthusiasts. A landmark in short fiction studies.” (Ailsa Cox, Professor of Short Fiction, Edge Hill University, author of “Writing Short Stories” (2^nd edition, 2016))

“Read in sequence, these essays build their own story, from the meanings of “work” in George Saunders’s art to the representations of a supersaturated consciousness in his polyphonic monologues. It’s about the moral imperatives behind the mind-tingling brilliance, the funny-sad humor and soulful grotesqueries, of a major American satirist, but it’s also about the practice of imaginative scholarship, and, not accidentally, about the inexhaustible wonders of the short story form.” (Susan Lohafer, Professor Emerita, University of Iowa, author of “Reading for Storyness” (2003))

• School of English, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

  Philip Coleman

• Independent Scholar, Des Moines, USA

  Steve Gronert Ellerhoff

Philip Coleman is Associate Professor and Fellow at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. His most recent books are John Berryman’s Public Vision: re-locating ‘the scene of disorder’ (2014), Berryman’s Fate: A Centenary Celebration in Verse (2014), and Critical Insights: David Foster Wallace (2015). He is currently co-editing a volume of John Berryman’s letters.


Steve Gronert Ellerhoff completed a PhD in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, in 2014. His thesis was published as Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut: Golden Apples of the Monkey House (2016). He is also the author of a novel, Time’s Laughingstocks (2013), a collection of short stories, Tales From the Internet (2015), and other fiction appearing online and in print.

Policies and ethics