No good liberal could disagree and yet there is a sense with many of these pieces that we haven't really been convinced of anything we didn't already feel. To call them 'essays' is a little grandiose a number of the pieces here are reworked articles from GQ and the New Yorker also included is the introduction to the Modern Library Edition of Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and various accounts of Saunders's formation as a reader and writer (he originally trained and worked as an engineer).īut if there is an overarching theme to the collection, it is the moral that, if only we took the time to try to understand one another instead of emphasising our differences, the world would be a friendlier and more harmonious place and that this goes double for America with regard to foreign policy. His casually surreal short stories have earned frequent comparisons with Donald Barthelme, one of his literary heroes, whose particular genius is among the subjects tackled in this, his first collection of non-fiction writing. His work is loved by such contemporaries as Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen and Tobias Wolff, though British readers may know him best for his American Psyche column in the Guardian magazine.

Since the publication of his first story collection in 1996, George Saunders has been carving out a reputation as one of the leading American comic writers of the McSweeney's generation.

George saunders the braindead megaphone