Imagine for a moment that you go into the up-scale liquor store around the block that is celebrated city-wide for its fabulous wine selection. You're a bit of a novice when it comes to wine and are a little embarrassed to be here because your wallet is that ballistic nylon stuff and not something truly exotic like alligator skin and with that in mind you decide not to ask the sommelier for any help. You browse around the store looking for a bottle of something called David Foster Wallace that wa...

DECEMBER EDIT: So when this title popped up as someone 'liked' it, I thought, "wow, I am truly losing my mind. I don't recognize that title. And that cover? That looks COMPLETELY unlike my taste." When I investigated further, I discovered it was a collection, not the short story I originally reviewed. Yet another stand-alone story originally rated and reviewed that was smashed into a new title. I officially Wish a Thousand Female Mosquitoes Upon Each of the Librarians that condone this shit.Mean...

“Bread and circuses,” ancients used to say… And George Saunders smartly turns the art of modern entertainment into an effervescent absurdist comedy.Pastoralia is some sort of luna park or freak show established to educate and amuse the public. The protagonist works there impersonating a caveman.And the ways the society is being entertained tell everything about society as such too…“Remember I told you about Chief Joseph, who never stopped walking? You’re like him. My brave little warrior. Bibby,...

I think that if the arrangement of this collection had been reversed I would be singing a different tune right now, but as it stands I am a bit torn regarding rating this thing. Man, these stories are well-written. Saunders is darkly witty, and clearly his heart is in the right place. His main point of contention with the modern world is the reckless hammer of Capitalism, an easy target to be sure, but that is arguably all the more reason to call it into question. The injuries that it inflicts a...

Based on the opinions of people with excellent taste in books, I knew I was in for something good when I grabbed Pastoralia from the shelf the other day. I didn't know what to expect beyond that but it sure wasn't the sardonic giggles this collection gave me. Does everyone find their first foray into Saunders's mind this darkly endearing? 'Cause.... lemme tell you, you all led me somewhere I can't wait to revisit.There is something off about the worlds Saunders creates. Not off-the-charts unbeli...

Almost two decades before George Saunders published the everybody's-talking-about-it book, Lincoln in the Bardo, he published Pastoralia.Pastoralia is a collection of six short stories, and they are some of the weirdest, bleakest, and most well-written ones I've ever encountered. As I worked through (struggled through) each one of them, I kept asking myself, Are these dystopian? I tend to think of "dystopian" as futuristic, or containing more futuristic elements, of government-imposed rations, r...

At a glance I see that some Goodreads readers do not like these celebrated stories as much as some of his more recent work, such as in The Tenth of December, which I loved. And I know awards and prestigious publication sites are no guarantee of quality, but hey, every one of these stories was published in The New Yorker and four of the six were awarded the highest honor in short story writing, O. Henry Awards, from 1997-2001. And sure, regardless of what others think of them, since that is one p...

Any person who does not deeply love George Saunders is not allowed to be my friend. Even a little bit.

''His childhood dreams had been so bright, he had hoped for so much, it couldn't be true that he was a nobody.''These stories, wacky as they may be, don't paint a very flattering portrait of modern life. A father takes a job as a grunting caveman at a run-down theme park in order to pay his son's exorbitant medical bills. A male stripper earns a meagre wage to support his ungrateful family, who spend their day watching reality TV like How My Child Died Violently and The Worst That Could Happen,

Like other folks I know and respect on Goodreads, I loved the opening, titular story but found the rest of the book to be middling. Like, disappointingly, forgettably, middling. I know the stories were kinda weird and stuff but for the life of me I can barely even remember what they were about or even distinguish them from each other. I don't think I've ever felt so uneven about a short story collection. It's so strange that it makes me curious enough to give them a reread at some point, despite...

The stories in Pastoralia were pretty great. Saunders definitely has a schtick here – sad-sack characters worn down by the unfairness of life in (mostly) comedic situations – but as there’s just six stories, it doesn’t get a chance to wear thin. The satire is goofy yet melancholic and it never feels mean. Such a short book though, reading it all in one go means it’s over too soon.

Bernie Kowalski is one of life's helpers. Quiet and shy, she's been given the wrong end of every deal, but she just keeps on finding the bright side and helping those she can. So when she dies, alone and terrified in a shitty flat, you could forgive her nephew for finding that unfair. If I had my way I'd move everybody up to Canada. It's nice there. Very polite. We went for a weekend last fall and got a flat tire and these two farmers with bright-red faces insisted on fixing it, then springing f...

I finished this last night when I couldn't sleep ... I adore George Saunders in small doses, he is so very funny and has such an ear for the pathos of our sad American industrial poverty. But there's a kind of story that he writes over and over again ... not exactly the same story but the same kind of story. A story about a hilariously awful job, a hilariously difficult life and a sad, pathetic person stuck within. I don't even object to the repetition, but when I read it all back to back the re...

So funny and so so so bleak. Wow.

This collection was totally up my alley. Saunders' writing kind of reminds me of Vonnegut, who I later realized was one of his inspirations. I was not a fan of Lincoln in the Bardo, but I'm so happy I gave his short stories a chance. Can't wait to read more of his work!

Sea Oak is jarring, funny, and unexpected. I promise it will not bore you.

This is a really fun collection of 5 short stories and one novella by an author I didn’t know before. It is also a collection I’ll enjoy reading again soon. It contains humourous, sad, surreal and futuristic tales. George Saunders is certainly an author to remember. I “discovered” the title here on Goodreads!

This is the second collection of Saunder’s short stories I’ve read and Pastorlia is cut from the same cloth as the first. Think of the cartoon strip, The Far Side, in story form and you’ll get the idea of what his writing is like. His stories are weird and funny, with a pronounced absurdist edge to them. Saunders often populates his stories with a menagerie of misfits who are life’s punching bags. While their struggles are played for laughs, there is, at times, an underlying pathos to his charac...

‘Pastoralia’ (the opening story) shows what Saunders can do. How his prose can be funny and surreal and warm and satirical and touching. Unfortunately, having done this, the other stories in this collection seem like shticky filler. ‘Winky’ was another strong piece, but I found myself snoozing through ‘Sea Oak’ which does a surrealist dance in a ra-ra skirt, and getting annoyed by his rhythms in ‘The Barber’s Unhappiness.’ His repetition, his rambling passages of superfluous detail, how he goes

These warped and strange stories of misfits, losers and other sidelined people are just amazing. I found it really hard to stop reading. Funny, sad, insightful, dark and sometimes off putting, the characters feel authentic even at their most downtrodden. The title story is just bizarre, a theme park of sorts where the exhibits are live-in actors of sorts, the featured couple are cavemen. It’s a situation Saunders uses to criticise work conditions and society in general. The second story, “Winky”...

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)I had the pleasure of getting to talk with legendary author George Saunders for CCLaP's podcast last week, a rare treat given how in demand he is on this latest tour even among the major media; but that meant I had to do some serious cramming in the few weeks leading up to our talk, in that (I guiltily con...

This collection is easily the best collection of stories I have had the pleasure to ever read. Dark. Cynical. Horrific. And, yet, these stories possess a level of truth in each one that resonates long after the story ends. Simply put: George Saunders is brilliant.

This might just be the epitome of-what Justin Isis refers to as "White Dad Fiction", though I'm not sure if this is precisely the sort of thing he had in mind with that designation. The stories in Pastoralia, while bookended with stories featuring white dads as protagonists (at least I think they're white; their skin tone is never mentioned), are certainly weirder than most of what passes for "weird fiction" from what I've read. The stories are heavy on social satire and existential queasy uneas...

Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh04b...Featured in my Top 5 George Saunders Books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bc7g...The opening novella is exquisite and there are a few very strong pieces in here, (and it's not like the others suck or anything really), but overall there's a certain redundancy in themes and characters through the collection that damages the overall effect.I'd suggest reading it one story at a time every once in a while, rather than in a single / a few sittin...

Terrific, even better than CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, but with similar themes. I shared the unanswered question at the end of Sea Oak, for sure. Don't crap in my oatmeal, okay?

A year ago I'd never heard of George Saunders, and now I've got two of his short stories collections under my belt.Reading Pastoralia I can see the groundwork being laid for the better Tenth of December. There's the awful theme park with its put-upon employees; there's the smarmy, dickbag bosses, the memos from management, the collection of losers who are forced to choose between a terrible job and their human decency; there's the misfits and retards and losers and geeks and qweebs and losers an...

Comic GeniusThe only American publication I still receive here in Spain is The New Yorker. It gets here a little late so you'll have to excuse the late news. Probably my favorite funny person in the world, George Saunders, has a story in the May 28 issue. Not to spoil this mess of a story for you but I found this part laugh-out-loud funny. Why did I find it laugh-out-loud funny? It just is. But if no one took the pup he’d do it. He’d have to. Because his feeling was, when you said you were going...

6 stories, one 5 star, two 4 stars, two 3 stars, and one 2 star = 3.5. I'm rounding to a three despite my LOVE for this author. One of the issues is the stories appeared in the order of best to worst (in my opinion), so that left you feeling a little bereft at the end instead of elated. Had the order been reversed, I probably would have gone with 4 stars.Saunders' stories make fun of the mundane in very creative ways, and I really enjoy his weird characters. But you can tell this was his first b...

Worth it for the title story alone. It had quotes I swear I'd heard from the mouths of my own managers last week, which hit my ear wrong for reasons this story helped me to understand. A perfect marriage of incomplete real-life observations brought to the table of fiction for illumination. I am improved as a human.George Saunders: putting the rest of us to shame since he got good.Briefly has you believing that the world is some big crazy distraction-machine filled with squishy little compassion

Good grief. After reading Civilwarland in Bad Decline, I thought, "It might be a hokey throwback to Vonnegut, but by Samuel Clemens' ghost, George has got something here..." Of course, after reading Pastoralia, I have become strangely skeptical of his growth as an author. Sure, what Saunders has produced is worthy of attention, but is he a one-trick pony? I want to see him change his style a bit between books. Even in In Persuasion Nation, Saunders sounds like a copy of himself--albeit one who h...