MACMILLAN George Saunders: Critical Essays (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

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. Review “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)) From the Back Cover 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. About the Author 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.