The Book-a-Week Project, Week 18

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella
George Saunders

Saunders kindly presents us with another collection of stories written with such incredible skill as to seem effortless. He further explores passivity and consumerism, and features more failing theme parks marketing specific American historical periods to gullible tourists. The novella, "Bounty", about a mutant's journey cross-country to save his sister, is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

These stories are not as overtly humorous as most of his others, but still just as enveloping and sharp. If you're not a bad person, you should be reading George Saunders' output. And loving it.

The promotional site for his most recent collection, In Persuasion Nation, lets you download a chapbook titled A Bee Stung Me So I Killed All the Fish, filled with stories mostly concerning the big war that everyone's talking about. God damn it's good. Now you are thankful.

I already finished it, but if I wasn't so fucking behind on these reviews, the next book would have been To the Edge: A Man, Death Valley, and the Mystery of Endurance. It's about Badwater, one of the toughest footraces on the planet. I fantasize about having done it, but not doing it.