Writers to admire queue up on the back cover of George Saunders’s new book in an earnest arms race of praise. “He will be read long after these times have passed,” Zadie Smith says. “George Saunders makes you feel as though you are reading fiction for the first time,” Khaled Hosseini suggests. “He makes the all-but-impossible look effortless,” Jonathan Franzen insists. “We’re lucky to have him.”
It is hard to imagine Saunders himself not cracking up at all that solemn hyperbole. Do the nine, often wonderfully absurd, short stories within live up to this billing? Well, you might say, yes and no. After the Booker success of Lincoln in the Bardo, his only novel, Saunders has returned to the form in which he has always written, forever restlessly reinventing its possibilities, once again enjoying his own brilliant dexterities and exploring truths about the way we live now.
