In this, his first collection of essays, Saunders trains his eye on the real world rather than the fictional and reveals it to be brimming with wonderful, marvellous strangeness. As he faces a political and cultural reality saturated with lazy media, false promises and political doublespeak, Saunders invokes the wisdom of American literary heroes Twain, Vonnegut and Barthelme and inspires us to re-examine our assumptions about the world we live in, as we struggle to discover what is really there.

Author Biography

George Saunders is the author of the novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil and three short story collections, In Persuasion Nation, Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, as well as the children's book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. His work has received four National Magazine Awards, and has been selected for the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories collections. In 1999, Saunders was recognized as one of the 20 best young American fiction writers by the New Yorker. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.